Julio Cortázar

Julio Cortázar (Ixelles, 1914 – Paris, 1984) was an Argentine writer who became a naturalised French citizen in 1981, and one of the most inventive prose writers in the Spanish language. A master of the short story, he was a central figure of the Latin American Boom, alongside García Márquez, Vargas Llosa and Fuentes. His stories move from the everyday to the fantastic, which is why he is often linked to Surrealism and magical realism.

He was born in Belgium to Argentine parents. The family passed through Switzerland and Barcelona before returning to Argentina when he was four. He grew up in Banfield, a suburb south of Buenos Aires, with his mother and sister. His father left the household when Julio was six. The sickly boy spent long stretches in bed reading; by the age of nine he had read Verne, Hugo and Poe, and his mother reportedly consulted a doctor about how much he read. He began writing very young, so young that his family doubted the texts were his.

He trained as a teacher and literature professor, and taught in provincial schools and, from 1944, at the National University of Cuyo in Mendoza, until he resigned in 1946 under Peronist political pressure. His first books attracted little notice: sonnets published under a pseudonym in 1938, which he later disowned, and the poetic drama Los reyes (1949). His breakthrough came with the story "Casa tomada", published in a magazine edited by Borges, and with the collection Bestiary (1951). That year he moved to Paris, where he lived for the rest of his life and worked as a translator, partly for UNESCO.

His stories, gathered in End of the Game (1956) and Secret Weapons (1959), blend everyday reality with the unsettling. In his novel Hopscotch (Rayuela, 1963) he offered a book that readers could read in different orders, full of digressions and formal freedom. He admired jazz for its improvisation and based the story "The Pursuer" on the bebop saxophonist Charlie Parker. In the 1960s and 1970s he engaged with Latin American politics, backed the Cuban revolution and denounced repression in Argentina. In 1981 he took French nationality as a protest against the military dictatorship.

He died in Paris in 1984, not long after his last trip to Argentina. His legacy lies in his way of telling stories: a prose that crosses the ordinary with the strange and renewed the short narrative in Spanish. His story "The Devil's Spittle" inspired Antonioni's film Blow-up.