Silvina Ocampo

Ocampo was born into one of Buenos Aires's wealthiest families, the youngest of six sisters that included Victoria Ocampo, founder of the influential magazine Sur. She trained as a painter in Paris, studying briefly under Fernand Léger and Giorgio de Chirico, before turning to writing in her thirties.

She married Adolfo Bioy Casares in 1940 and, alongside him and their close friend Jorge Luis Borges, compiled the landmark Anthology of Fantastic Literature the following year. Her own stories, collected in books including Thus Were Their Faces, were often overshadowed by her husband's and Borges's fame during her lifetime.

Recognition grew mainly after her death in Buenos Aires in 1993, as translators and critics rediscovered a body of work as unsettling as anything either man produced.