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Authors by Country · Latin AmericaThe Best Latin American Authors to Read
Latin American literature covers two main languages, Spanish and Portuguese, and more than a dozen national traditions, from Argentina and Chile to Mexico, Peru, Colombia and Brazil. Its twentieth-century writers changed how the novel and the short story could work, with labyrinthine fictions, ghost towns and multi-generational family sagas. A newer generation, many of them women, is now writing horror, rural crime and migration stories that travel widely in English translation.
This list is ordered chronologically by year of birth, from Jorge Luis Borges (born 1899) to Valeria Luiselli (born 1983). It mixes canonical names with living writers, and every author has at least one book in print in English. For each one there is a suggested first book, with its original publication year, and often a second title to read next.
Twelve Latin American authors, and where to start with each
Jorge Luis Borges
1899–1986 · Buenos Aires, Argentina
Borges wrote short, dense stories and essays that read like puzzles. His recurring subjects are labyrinths, mirrors, libraries, infinity, dreams, time and invented books by invented writers. Stories such as ‘The Library of Babel’ and ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’ treat ideas from philosophy and literature as plots in their own right.
He never won the Nobel Prize despite many nominations, but shared the International Formentor Prize with Samuel Beckett in 1961 and received the Cervantes Prize for 1979. The 1962 English collections Labyrinths and Ficciones introduced him to readers in the English-speaking world.
Read Borges if you like short fiction built around ideas, paradoxes and infinite libraries.
Start with Ficciones (1944). A collection of short stories, including ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ and ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’, built around labyrinths, libraries and literary games; first published in full in English in 1962. Or Labyrinths (1962). An English-language selection of Borges’s stories and essays, published by New Directions.
All Jorge Luis Borges books →Julio Cortázar
1914–1984 · Brussels, Belgium
Cortázar was an Argentine writer, born in Brussels, who later became a French citizen and died in Paris. His stories often place ordinary people in strange or frightening situations, and his novels borrow from surrealism, stream of consciousness and the improvised rhythms of jazz; the story ‘El perseguidor’ is based on Charlie Parker.
Hopscotch is his best-known book, a novel that can be read straight through or in a different, jumping order. Readers who prefer shorter work can start with the stories in Blow-Up and Other Stories, translated by Paul Blackburn.
Read Cortázar if you want fiction that plays with form and turns everyday life uncanny.
Start with Hopscotch (1963). A novel following Horacio Oliveira between Paris and Argentina, which can be read in a linear or non-linear chapter order; translated by Gregory Rabassa in 1966. Or Blow-Up and Other Stories (1967). An English selection of stories drawn from several of Cortázar’s collections, translated by Paul Blackburn.
Juan Rulfo
1917–1986 · Apulco, Jalisco, Mexico
Rulfo’s reputation rests on two short books: the story collection The Burning Plain and the novel Pedro Páramo. Both are set in rural Jalisco and deal with poverty, land, violence during the Mexican Revolution and the Cristero War, and memory and death in places that seem half-abandoned.
His influence is far larger than his output. Gabriel García Márquez said that discovering Pedro Páramo in 1961 helped him find his way to One Hundred Years of Solitude. Several English translations exist, most recently by Douglas J. Weatherford.
Read Rulfo if you want a short, haunting novel that shaped a whole generation of writers.
Start with Pedro Páramo (1955). Juan Preciado travels to the ghost town of Comala to find his father, Pedro Páramo, and finds it populated by the voices of the dead. Or The Burning Plain (1953). Short stories of rural Mexico during and after the Revolution and the Cristero War.
All Juan Rulfo books →Clarice Lispector
1920–1977 · Chechelnyk, Ukraine
Lispector was a Brazilian writer born in Ukraine to a Jewish family who fled pogroms. She wrote in Portuguese, and her novels and stories focus on inner life, told through interior monologue and stream of consciousness. Her subjects include intimacy, language, the act of writing, and poverty and marginality in Brazil.
New English translations from 2011 onwards, including Benjamin Moser’s version of The Hour of the Star, brought her to a wider audience. Katrina Dodson’s translation of The Complete Stories won the PEN Translation Prize in 2016. She suits readers who enjoy introspective, unconventional prose.
Read Lispector if you like intense, inward-looking prose about consciousness and language.
Start with The Hour of the Star (1977). A narrator, Rodrigo S.M., tells the life of Macabéa, a poor typist in Rio de Janeiro; translated by Giovanni Pontiero and later by Benjamin Moser. Or The Complete Stories (2015). All of Lispector’s short stories in one English volume, translated by Katrina Dodson.
All Clarice Lispector books →Gabriel García Márquez
1927–2014 · Aracataca, Colombia
García Márquez is the writer most associated with magic realism, in which the fantastic is told in the same tone as the everyday. Much of his fiction is set in Macondo, a fictional town based mainly on his birthplace, and deals with solitude, love, political violence and dictatorship.
He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. Besides his best-known novels, a final novel, Until August, was published posthumously in 2024. He is a natural entry point for readers new to Latin American fiction.
Read García Márquez if you want a family saga in which the miraculous is treated as ordinary.
Start with One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). Seven generations of the Buendía family rise and fall in Macondo, the town their patriarch founded; translated by Gregory Rabassa in 1970. Or Love in the Time of Cholera (1985). A later novel built around an unconventional love story.
Mario Vargas Llosa
1936–2025 · Arequipa, Peru
Vargas Llosa’s novels examine power and the people caught inside it: the military, corrupt regimes and dictators. His themes include the individual’s struggle for freedom, violence, fanaticism and defeat. He could also be comic, as in Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, based in part on his first marriage.
He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010 ‘for his cartography of structures of power’, and died in Lima in April 2025. His books suit readers who like political fiction with complex, multi-voiced structures.
Read Vargas Llosa if you want political novels about dictatorship and the cost of power.
Start with The Feast of the Goat (2000). A novel about the 1961 assassination of the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, told partly through Urania Cabral, who returns to the country in 1996; translated by Edith Grossman. Or Conversation in The Cathedral (1969). A long novel about corruption and abuse of power under dictatorship in Peru.
Isabel Allende
Born 1942 · Lima, Peru
Allende is a Chilean-American novelist, born in Lima, whose books follow women’s lives against a background of historical upheaval. She often mixes myth and realism, and returns to exile, memory, loss and the Pinochet dictatorship. Feminism and human rights are recurring concerns, and she has also written memoir, including Paula.
She received Chile’s National Prize for Literature in 2010 and the US Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014. Her novels are widely available in English and suit readers who like long, character-driven historical fiction.
Read Allende if you like sweeping family novels with strong women at their centre.
Start with The House of the Spirits (1982). Four generations of the Trueba family live through political upheaval in a fictional Chile from the early 1900s to the 1970s; translated by Magda Bogin in 1985.
All Isabel Allende books →Roberto Bolaño
1953–2003 · Santiago, Chile
Bolaño wrote about poets, wanderers and literary outsiders, and about violence in modern Latin America, from the Pinochet regime to the shadow of Nazism and fascism. His books often make writers their heroes, villains or detectives, and treat poetry and crime as closely connected.
He won the Rómulo Gallegos Prize in 1999 for The Savage Detectives. 2666 was published after his death and won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2008 in Natasha Wimmer’s translation. Chris Andrews translated By Night in Chile and Distant Star.
Read Bolaño if you want big, restless novels about literature, exile and violence.
Start with The Savage Detectives (1998). Many voices recall the poets Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima over twenty years, and their 1976 search for a vanished poet in the Sonoran Desert; translated by Natasha Wimmer. Or 2666 (2004). His final novel, published posthumously in five parts and set in Santa Teresa, a fictional city modelled on Ciudad Juárez.
Mariana Enríquez
Born 1973 · Buenos Aires, Argentina
Enríquez writes horror rooted in contemporary Argentina, where ghosts and the supernatural sit alongside the country’s history, including the crimes of the military dictatorship. Her short story collections and her novel Our Share of Night are all translated into English by Megan McDowell.
Our Share of Night won Spain’s Premio Herralde in 2019, and A Sunny Place for Shady People won the World Fantasy Award for best collection in 2025. She suits readers who want literary fiction that is also frightening.
Read Enríquez if you want horror with a political and social edge.
Start with Things We Lost in the Fire (2016). A collection of dark, often supernatural stories set in Argentina; published in English in 2017. Or Our Share of Night (2019). After his wife’s death, Juan and his son Gaspar try to escape the Order, a secret society that wants to use their supernatural abilities; published in English in 2023.
Samanta Schweblin
Born 1978 · Buenos Aires, Argentina
Schweblin is an Argentine writer based in Berlin. Her short novels and stories create unease out of everyday situations: children poisoned in a farming town, or strangers watching and steering camera-fitted robotic toys over the internet. All her English translations are by Megan McDowell.
Fever Dream was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2017, and Seven Empty Houses won the US National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2022. Her most recent collection in English is Good and Evil and Other Stories (2025).
Read Schweblin if you like short, tense books that build dread from ordinary life.
Start with Fever Dream (2014). In a clinic, Amanda pieces together how her daughter Nina and other children in an Argentine farming town were poisoned; published in English in 2017. Or Seven Empty Houses (2015). A story collection that won the 2022 National Book Award for Translated Literature in Megan McDowell’s English translation.
Fernanda Melchor
Born 1982 · Boca del Río, Veracruz, Mexico
Melchor writes about violence, poverty and misogyny in her home state of Veracruz, in long, snaking sentences that move between several voices. Her fiction can be hard to read for its subject matter: Hurricane Season has been described as a novel about femicide in Mexico.
Hurricane Season was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2020 and Paradais was longlisted in 2022, both in Sophie Hughes’s translation. This Is Not Miami, first published in Spanish in 2013, appeared in English in 2023.
Read Melchor if you can handle brutal subject matter told in breathless, intense prose.
Start with Hurricane Season (2017). After children find a corpse in a canal in the Veracruz town of La Matosa, several narrators trace the events that led to the murder of the local Witch; translated by Sophie Hughes. Or Paradais (2021). Her second novel in English, published in 2022 and longlisted for the International Booker Prize.
Valeria Luiselli
Born 1983 · Mexico City, Mexico
Luiselli writes novels and essays about migration, archives, art and the borders between countries and between fiction and fact. Her first books were written in Spanish and translated by Christina MacSweeney; Lost Children Archive was her first novel written in English.
Tell Me How It Ends draws on her work as a volunteer interpreter for child migrants in a New York immigration court. Lost Children Archive won the Dublin Literary Award in 2021. She suits readers interested in fiction that takes on current politics through form and documents.
Read Luiselli if you want fiction about migration and borders that experiments with form.
Start with Lost Children Archive (2019). A family drives from New York to Arizona, and as the parents’ marriage comes apart the two children set off to look for missing migrant children. Or The Story of My Teeth (2013). A playful novel, translated by Christina MacSweeney in 2015, that won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction.
Which Latin American author should you read first?
The best starting point depends on what you want from a book.
- For a first taste of the classics — Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)
- For short stories built on ideas — Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones (1944)
- For a short, haunting novel — Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo (1955)
- For literary horror — Mariana Enríquez, Things We Lost in the Fire (2016)
- For political fiction — Mario Vargas Llosa, The Feast of the Goat (2000)
- For a Portuguese-language classic — Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star (1977)
Where to go next
Frequently asked questions
Who is the most famous Latin American author?
Gabriel García Márquez is probably the most widely read, above all for One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967); he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. Jorge Luis Borges is equally influential among writers.
Which Latin American authors have won the Nobel Prize in Literature?
On this list, Gabriel García Márquez (1982) and Mario Vargas Llosa (2010). Borges was nominated many times but never won.
Where should I start with Latin American literature?
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Pedro Páramo and Borges’s Ficciones are common starting points. For contemporary writing, try Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream, which is short.
Who are the best contemporary Latin American writers?
Living writers widely read in English include Mariana Enríquez, Samanta Schweblin, Fernanda Melchor, Valeria Luiselli and Alejandro Zambra, whose Chilean Poet appeared in English in 2022.
Are there Brazilian authors on this list?
Yes: Clarice Lispector, who wrote in Portuguese. The Hour of the Star (1977) is her most accessible novel in English.
Is Isabel Allende Chilean or Peruvian?
Allende was born in Lima, Peru, in 1942, but she is Chilean; she has also held US citizenship since 1993 and won Chile’s National Prize for Literature in 2010.
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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