Jorge Ibargüengoitia

Ibargüengoitia trained originally as a playwright and engineer before turning to fiction and journalism, writing a long-running, acidly funny newspaper column that made him one of Mexico's most quoted satirists well before his novels found a wide readership.

The Dead Girls fictionalized a real case of a brothel where its owners murdered and buried women who had outlived their usefulness, narrated with the same flat, documentary irony he brought to Mexican political corruption and revolutionary myth-making elsewhere in his fiction.

He had moved to Paris in his final years and died in 1983 in the crash of Air France Flight 007 near Madrid, a disaster that also killed fellow Latin American writers Manuel Scorza, Ángel Rama, and Marta Traba.