Manuel Puig

Juan Manuel Puig Delledonne (General Villegas, 1932 – Cuernavaca, 1990), known as Manuel Puig, was an Argentine novelist who reshaped the Spanish-language novel from the 1960s onward. Writing largely from exile, he drew on cinema, mass culture and close psychological interiority, and became one of the most distinctive voices in twentieth-century Latin American fiction.

He grew up in a small town in the province of Buenos Aires, where his mother's love of films shaped his early life. As a teenager he moved to the capital for school and tried several academic paths before aiming at a career in film. A scholarship took him to Rome to study cinema, but he gradually realised that writing suited him better than directing. He then lived in a succession of cities, including Paris, London, New York, Rio de Janeiro and Mexico.

His first major novel, Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, made his reputation through its use of dialogue, letters and the conventions of popular romance. His later books deepened his use of multiple voices and interior monologue, mixing popular and learned registers. His prose borrows the grammar of film, with cuts, shifting viewpoints and the rhythms of melodrama he had absorbed as a child.

He wrote novels, plays and screenplays, and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. His themes include repression, sexuality and the tension between fantasy and everyday life. He openly campaigned for gay rights and argued that sexuality should not define a person's whole identity. Later Latin American writers often cite him as proof that popular culture could enter serious fiction.