Biographical note

Mario Vargas Llosa was born in Peru in 1936. He is the author of some of the last half-century's most important novels, including The War of the End of the World, The Feast of the Goat, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter and Conversation in the Cathedral. In 2010 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Gregory Rabassa was one of the most prominent translators of Latin American literature into English. Born in Yonkers, New York, in 1922, Rabassa obtained his degree from Columbia University and held a position as professor of Romance Languages and Comparative Literature at Queens College, City University of New York. Among his most recognized translations are One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Nobel Laureate Gabriel García Márquez; Paradiso, by José Lezama Lima; and The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, by Joachim Maria Machado de Assis. Other authors whose works Rabassa has translated are Miguel Ángel Asturias, Manuel Mujica Láinez, Clarice Lispector, Mario Vargas Llosa, Demetrio Aguilera-Malta, Dalton Trevisan, Jorge Amado, José Donoso, Luisa Valenzuela, Luis Rafael Sánchez, and Osman Lins.