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Authors by Country · ArgentinaThe Best Argentine Authors to Read
Argentine literature has a strong taste for the fantastic, the philosophical and the strange. Borges and his circle in Buenos Aires turned the short story into a vehicle for ideas, while later writers used fiction to deal with the dictatorship of 1976–1983, exile and the country’s violent history. Today Argentina is one of the most translated sources of Spanish-language fiction, especially rural noir, feminist writing and short, inventive novels.
This list is ordered chronologically by year of birth, from Jorge Luis Borges (born 1899) to Selva Almada (born 1973). It mixes canonical names with living writers, and every author has at least one book available in English translation. For each one there is a suggested first book, with its original publication year, and often a second title to read next.
Twelve Argentine authors, and where to start with each
Jorge Luis Borges
1899–1986 · Buenos Aires, Argentina
Borges wrote short, dense stories and essays that work like puzzles, built around labyrinths, mirrors, libraries, infinity, dreams and invented books by invented writers. He also worked closely with other writers on this list: with Silvina Ocampo and Adolfo Bioy Casares he compiled an anthology of fantastic literature in 1940, and with Bioy he wrote crime stories under the pseudonym H. Bustos Domecq.
He shared the International Formentor Prize with Samuel Beckett in 1961 and shared the Cervantes Prize in 1979, but never won the Nobel. The English selections Labyrinths and Ficciones, both from 1962, made his name in the English-speaking world.
Read Borges if you like short fiction built around ideas and paradoxes.
Start with Ficciones (1944). Short stories such as ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ and ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’, built around labyrinths, libraries and literary games. Or Labyrinths (1962). An English-language selection of Borges’s stories and essays, published by New Directions.
All Jorge Luis Borges books →Roberto Arlt
1900–1942 · Buenos Aires, Argentina
Arlt wrote rough, colloquial and often surreal novels about the poor, the desperate and the half-mad of Buenos Aires. His first novel, Mad Toy (1926), was followed by The Seven Madmen (1929) and its sequel The Flamethrowers (1931). He also wrote newspaper sketches of city life, collected as Aguafuertes porteñas.
His narratives of Buenos Aires have been described as rough, brutal, colloquial and surreal, closer to the street than to the libraries of Borges. He died in Buenos Aires in 1942. Nick Caistor’s translation of The Seven Madmen for NYRB Classics appeared in 2015.
Read Arlt if you want a dark, feverish novel of Buenos Aires low life.
Start with The Seven Madmen (1929). After losing his job and his wife, Erdosain drifts through Buenos Aires and joins a group of plotters led by a man called the Astrologer, who plan to remake society by violent means. Or Mad Toy (1926). Arlt’s first novel, translated by Michele McKay Aynesworth for Duke University Press in 2002.
Silvina Ocampo
1903–1993 · Buenos Aires, Argentina
Ocampo wrote short stories and poems full of doubles, metamorphoses, mirrors and cruel or uncanny children. Her fiction often turns against adult and patriarchal authority, with a dark sense of humour. She married Adolfo Bioy Casares in 1940, and that year compiled an anthology of fantastic literature with him and Borges.
Recent English translations include the story selection Thus Were Their Faces (NYRB, 2015), a volume of poems translated by Jason Weiss, the novel Where There’s Love, There’s Hate (2013), and the novella The Promise (2019), both translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Jessica Powell.
Read Ocampo if you like dark, strange short stories with a cruel streak of humour.
Start with Thus Were Their Faces (2015). A selection of her short fiction, translated by Daniel Balderston, with a preface by Borges and an introduction by Helen Oyeyemi. Or The Promise (2019). A late novella, published in English in 2019 and translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Jessica Powell.
Ernesto Sabato
1911–2011 · Rojas, Buenos Aires Province, Argentina
Sabato trained as a physicist, earning a doctorate in 1938 and working at the Curie Institute in Paris, before leaving science in 1943 to write and paint. He published only three novels: The Tunnel (1948), a first-person psychological novel framed by existentialism, On Heroes and Tombs (1961) and Abaddón el exterminador (1974).
After the dictatorship he chaired the commission that investigated the disappearances of 1976–1983, and in 1984 presented its report, Nunca Más. He also received the Cervantes Prize, and died in 2011, aged 99. The Tunnel is short and the usual way in.
Read Sabato if you want a short, intense existential novel about obsession.
Start with The Tunnel (1948). From his prison cell, the painter Juan Pablo Castel explains how his obsession with María Iribarne, a woman he met at his exhibition, led him to kill her; translated by Margaret Sayers Peden. Or On Heroes and Tombs (1961). Sabato’s longest novel, widely considered his most important.
Adolfo Bioy Casares
1914–1999 · Buenos Aires, Argentina
Bioy Casares wrote inventive fiction that borrows from science fiction and the detective story. With Borges he wrote comic crime stories under the pseudonym H. Bustos Domecq, beginning with Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi (1942). His later novels include Diary of the War of the Pig (1969) and Asleep in the Sun (1973).
He married Silvina Ocampo in 1940 and received the Cervantes Prize in 1990. The Invention of Morel came with a prologue by Borges; NYRB Classics published a new translation by Margaret Jull Costa, as Morel’s Invention, in October 2026.
Read Bioy Casares if you want a short, clever novel of ideas that reads like science fiction.
Start with The Invention of Morel (1940). A fugitive hides on a remote island and slowly realises that the people he sees there are recordings made by a machine invented by a man named Morel. Or Asleep in the Sun (1973). A later novel, published in English in 1978.
Antonio Di Benedetto
1922–1986 · Mendoza, Argentina
Di Benedetto, from Mendoza in western Argentina, is best known for Zama (1956), which critics consider his most important book. It was followed by The Silentiary (1964) and The Suicides (1969), and all three are now available in English from NYRB in translations by Esther Allen.
In 1976, under the military dictatorship, he was imprisoned and tortured; released a year later, he went into exile in Spain and returned in 1984. Esther Allen’s translation of Zama appeared in 2016, and Lucrecia Martel’s film adaptation followed in 2017.
Read Di Benedetto if you want a strange, slow-burning colonial novel about waiting in vain.
Start with Zama (1956). Don Diego de Zama, a minor official of the Spanish empire stationed in remote Paraguay in the late eighteenth century, waits year after year for a transfer that never comes; translated by Esther Allen. Or The Silentiary (1964). El silenciero, translated by Esther Allen for NYRB in 2022, with an introduction by Juan José Saer.
Manuel Puig
1932–1990 · General Villegas, Argentina
Puig built his novels out of popular culture: films, soap operas and the voices of ordinary people. Drawing on his own work in film and television, books such as Betrayed by Rita Hayworth (1968) and Heartbreak Tango (1969) use montage and multiple points of view rather than a single narrator.
He left Argentina in 1973 for political reasons and lived in exile for most of his life, dying in Cuernavaca, Mexico, in 1990. Kiss of the Spider Woman was filmed by Héctor Babenco in 1985 and became a Broadway musical in 1993.
Read Puig if you want a novel told through dialogue, film plots and pop culture.
Start with Kiss of the Spider Woman (1976). In a Buenos Aires prison in 1975, Molina and the political prisoner Valentín share a cell, and Molina passes the time by retelling films; told almost entirely in dialogue and translated by Thomas Colchie. Or Betrayed by Rita Hayworth (1968). His first novel, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and reissued by Dalkey Archive Press in 2009.
Alejandra Pizarnik
1936–1972 · Avellaneda, Argentina
Pizarnik wrote short, intense poems about silence, night, death and the limits of language. Between 1960 and 1964 she lived in Paris, where she worked for the magazine Cuadernos, translated other writers, studied at the Sorbonne and became friends with Octavio Paz, who wrote the prologue to Diana’s Tree (1962).
She died in Buenos Aires in 1972, aged 36. Yvette Siegert has translated much of her poetry, including Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962–1972 and A Musical Hell for New Directions; other translations come from Cecilia Rossi and Anna Deeny Morales.
Read Pizarnik if you want brief, dark poems that read like fragments of a diary.
Start with Extracting the Stone of Madness (1968). A New Directions selection of her poems from 1962 to 1972, translated by Yvette Siegert and named after her 1968 collection. Or Diana’s Tree (1962). An early collection of very short poems, with a prologue by Octavio Paz.
Juan José Saer
1937–2005 · Serodino, Santa Fe Province, Argentina
Saer wrote novels that draw on colonial history, crime and the life of his home province, Santa Fe. His books include Scars (1969), Glosa (1986), The Event and his last novel, La grande, published after his death in 2005.
He moved to Paris in 1968 and taught at the University of Rennes. The Event won the Premio Nadal in 1987. In English, Margaret Jull Costa translated The Witness, and Steve Dolph has translated several novels for Open Letter.
Read Saer if you want serious, reflective fiction about memory, history and meaning.
Start with The Witness (1983). A cabin boy sailing from Spain in the sixteenth century is the only survivor of an expedition attacked by the people of the land, and must face his fate among them; translated by Margaret Jull Costa. Or Scars (1969). An early novel, translated by Steve Dolph for Open Letter in 2011.
César Aira
1949– · Coronel Pringles, Buenos Aires Province, Argentina
Aira has published more than a hundred short books, most of them novellas that start realistically and veer off into the absurd, the surreal or the fantastic. Instead of revising, he follows what he calls a ‘flight forward’, improvising his way out of whatever corner the story has reached.
Most of his books in English are translated by Chris Andrews for New Directions, and they are short enough to read in an afternoon. He won the Manuel Rojas Ibero-American Narrative Award in 2016 and the Formentor Prize in 2021.
Read Aira if you want short, unpredictable novels that go somewhere unexpected.
Start with How I Became a Nun (1993). A six-year-old named César, newly moved to Rosario with the family, is poisoned by a strawberry ice cream, and the consequences grow ever more outlandish. Or An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter (2006). The German painter Johann Moritz Rugendas travels onto the Argentine pampas in search of a total vision of the landscape, at a terrible cost; published in English in 2006, translated by Chris Andrews.
Gabriela Cabezón Cámara
1968– · San Isidro, Buenos Aires Province, Argentina
Cabezón Cámara writes exuberant, politically charged fiction that rewrites Argentine myths. Slum Virgin, translated by Frances Riddle, was her first book in English, and The Adventures of China Iron retells the national epic Martín Fierro from the point of view of the gaucho’s nameless wife.
The Adventures of China Iron, translated by Iona Macintyre and Fiona Mackintosh for Charco Press, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2020. Her novel We Are Green and Trembling, translated by Robin Myers, was longlisted for the same prize in 2026.
Read Cabezón Cámara if you want a joyful, subversive rewrite of a national classic.
Start with The Adventures of China Iron (2017). Martín Fierro’s nameless young wife leaves her village and crosses the pampas with Liz, a Scottish-English woman, learning to read, falling in love and finally joining an Indigenous community. Or We Are Green and Trembling (2023). Las niñas del naranjel, published in English by New Directions in 2025 and translated by Robin Myers.
Selva Almada
1973– · Villa Elisa, Entre Ríos, Argentina
Almada writes about rural and provincial Argentina, especially the river country of the Littoral, and about masculinity, violence and femicide. Her ‘trilogy of men’ consists of The Wind That Lays Waste (2012), Brickmakers (2013) and Not a River (2021). Dead Girls is a nonfiction account of three murders of young women in the 1980s.
Most of her work is translated by Annie McDermott for Charco Press, while Chris Andrews translated The Wind That Lays Waste. Not a River was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2024.
Read Almada if you want short, tense rural fiction about men, violence and the landscape.
Start with Not a River (2021). Three men go fishing on a river where a terrible accident happened years earlier, and over one hot day the past and the local people close in on them; translated by Annie McDermott. Or Dead Girls (2014). A nonfiction investigation into the murders of three young women in provincial Argentina in the 1980s.
Which Argentine author should you read first?
The best starting point depends on what you want from a book.
- For short stories built on ideas — Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones (1944)
- For a short novel of ideas — Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel (1940)
- For an existential thriller — Ernesto Sabato, The Tunnel (1948)
- For a rediscovered classic — Antonio Di Benedetto, Zama (1956)
- For something short and surreal — César Aira, How I Became a Nun (1993)
- For contemporary rural fiction — Selva Almada, Not a River (2021)
Where to go next
Frequently asked questions
Who is the most famous Argentine author?
Jorge Luis Borges is the most influential, above all for the stories in Ficciones. Julio Cortázar, author of Hopscotch, is equally well known and appears on the Latin American authors list.
Has an Argentine author won the Nobel Prize in Literature?
None of the writers on this list has won it, though Borges was nominated many times. Borges, Ernesto Sabato and Adolfo Bioy Casares all received the Cervantes Prize, the most important award for Spanish-language literature.
What is the best Argentine novel to start with?
Short choices include Bioy Casares’s The Invention of Morel, Sabato’s The Tunnel and Antonio Di Benedetto’s Zama. For something contemporary, try Selva Almada’s Not a River.
Who are the best contemporary Argentine writers?
Living writers widely read in English include César Aira, Gabriela Cabezón Cámara and Selva Almada, as well as Mariana Enríquez and Samanta Schweblin, who appear on the Latin American authors list.
Which Argentine books deal with the dictatorship?
Ernesto Sabato chaired the commission whose 1984 report, Nunca Más, documented the disappearances of 1976–1983. Antonio Di Benedetto was imprisoned under the dictatorship and Manuel Puig lived in exile; Kiss of the Spider Woman is set among political prisoners.
Were Borges, Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo friends?
Yes. Ocampo married Bioy Casares in 1940, and that year the three of them compiled an anthology of fantastic literature together. Borges and Bioy also co-wrote stories under the pseudonym H. Bustos Domecq.
Start with the author whose questions interest you most. The book you remember longest may not be the one with the clearest answers, but the one that changes how you see something familiar.
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