Manuel Puig

Puig grew up in a small Pampas town obsessed with the Hollywood films his mother took him to see, an escape he later credited with saving him from his surroundings. He studied filmmaking in Rome on an Italian government scholarship and worked briefly as an assistant director at Cinecittà before deciding he preferred writing dialogue to directing actors.

His debut, Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, was assembled almost entirely from overheard talk and film references; Kiss of the Spider Woman, banned outright by Argentina's military dictatorship, later became a Broadway musical and an Oscar-winning film.

Openly gay and increasingly uneasy in Perón-era and dictatorship-era Argentina, he lived most of his adult life in exile (Rome, New York, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City), where he died in 1990.