Juan Carlos Onetti was born in Montevideo in 1909. He is considered one of the greatest Spanish writers of the 20th century. Onetti published sixteen novels and eight collections of short stories between 1939-1993. He lived in Buenos Aires and Montevideo, until 1974, after Uruguayan dictatorship hospitalized him in a mental institution for three months. He subsequently left the country and resettled in Spain. Onetti won the Cervantes Prize for Literature in 1980 and was nominated for a Nobel Prize in Literature. He died in Madrid in 1994. Onetti never received widespread recognition such as Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez or Carlos Fuentes, however many readers and critics consider him one of the great modernists in the Spanish language.
