Ernesto Sabato

Sabato trained as a physicist, earning a doctorate and working briefly at the Curie Institute in Paris and the Joliot-Curie laboratory before growing disillusioned with both science and the Communist Party he had belonged to in his youth. He abandoned physics entirely in his thirties to write.

The Tunnel, his claustrophobic first novel, appeared in 1948 to admiration from Albert Camus and Thomas Mann among others. He wrote only two more novels across the following decades, devoting much of his later career to essays on science, ethics, and Argentine identity.

After Argentina's return to democracy in 1983, he chaired the government commission investigating the dictatorship's disappeared, whose report, Nunca Más, became a founding document of the country's human-rights reckoning. He died in 2011, three months short of a hundred.