Juan Carlos Onetti was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, but began writing in Buenos Aires in the late 1930s. He published short stories in La Nación and in the magazine Sur, founded by Victoria Ocampo and Jorge Luis Borges. He then proceeded to write novels centered around the imaginary town of Santa María, which he described through complex, poetic, and existentialist prose in "Los Astilleros," "Juntacadáveres," and "La vida breve." Due to Argentina's military dictatorship, he was exiled to Spain in 1976, where he worked as a writer for El País and several Latin American newspapers. His lyrical stories and compact novels awarded him the Cervantes Prize in 1980 and the Rodó Prize in 1991. About the translator: Katherine Silver has translated more than thirty books, mostly of literature from the Americas. Her translations include works by María Sonia Cristoff, Julio Ramón Ribeyro, Julio Cortázar, Daniel Sada, Horacio Castellanos Moya, César Aira, and Pedro Lemebel. She has received numerous awards and prizes, including three National Endowment of the Arts translation fellowships. She was recently translator-in-residence at the University of Iowa, and is the former director of the Banff International Literary Translation Centre.