Julio Cortázar

Cortázar was born in Brussels to Argentine parents stranded there by the First World War, and grew up in a Buenos Aires suburb reading voraciously through a sickly childhood. He trained and worked as a schoolteacher and translator, rendering Poe's complete stories into Spanish before politics made Argentina impossible for him.

Opposed to Perón's government, he left for Paris in 1951 and stayed for the rest of his life, working as a translator for UNESCO while writing the stories and novels that made him the Boom's most beloved experimenter. Hopscotch, structured as a book you could read two different ways, became a cult text for a generation.

Later in life he embraced Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutionary causes, funneling royalties to Sandinista projects. He died in Paris in 1984, not long after losing his fourth wife to leukemia.