César Aira

Aira grew up in the small town of Coronel Pringles before moving to Buenos Aires, where he has supported himself for decades through translation and occasional teaching rather than his fiction's modest earnings. He publishes largely through small, independent Argentine and Spanish presses rather than major houses.

Since the 1990s he has produced dozens of short novels, sometimes several a year, following a self-imposed method he calls 'the flight forward': writing straight through a manuscript without revision or backward glances, letting each day's pages set the direction for the next. Ghosts and The Literary Conference, with its scheme to clone Carlos Fuentes, both show the method's mix of the mundane and the deranged.

He remains prolific into his seventies, with well over a hundred titles to his name and an ever-growing cult readership in translation.