Ricardo Piglia

Piglia taught Latin American literature at Princeton for over two decades while remaining a central presence in Argentine letters from abroad, returning frequently and publishing steadily in Spanish. Early in his career he edited the influential 'Serie Negra,' a book series that introduced hardboiled American crime fiction to Argentine readers and shaped his own taste for detective structure.

Artificial Respiration, his first novel, braided a missing-persons investigation with literary criticism and unspoken references to Argentina's dictatorship, written and published in 1980 while censorship was still a live danger rather than a historical subject.

Diagnosed with ALS in his final years, he continued writing by dictating through eye-tracking software, publishing a late diary before his death in Buenos Aires in 2017.