Mario Vargas Llosa, born in Peru in 1936, is the author of some of the most significant writing to come out of South America in the past fifty years. His novels include The Green House, about a brothel in a Peruvian town that brings together the innocent and the corrupt; The Feast of the Goat, a vivid re-creation of the Dominican Republic during the final days of General Rafael Trujillo’s insidious regime; and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, a comedic semi-autobiographical account of an aspiring writer named Marito Varguitas, who falls in love with Julia, the divorced sister-in-law of his Uncle Lucho. He is also a widely read and respected essayist, writing everything from newspaper opinion pieces to critical works on other writers, including The Perpetual Orgy on Flaubert. Vargas Llosa is also active outside the literary arena, and was a serious contender for the presidency of Peru in 1990 (eventually losing to the now disgraced Alberto Fujimori), an experience he documented in his memoir, A Fish in the Water. On the controversial nature of some of his work he said, “The writer’s job is to write with rigor, with commitment, to defend what they believe with all the talent they have. I think that’s part of the moral obligation of a writer, which cannot be only purely artistic. I think a writer has some kind of responsibility at least to participate in the civic debate. I think literature is impoverished, if it becomes cut from the main agenda of people, of society, of life.” He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for the year 2010, "for his cartography of structures of power & his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat". http://us.macmillan.com/author/mariov...

Profesor y crítico literario peruano. Se doctoró en la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, en 1961. Terminados sus estudios, inició su labor docente, en esa misma universidad, ocupando las cátedras de Literatura Peruana y Literatura Hispanoamericana. Su labor como crítico literario e hispanista es ingente. Ha revisado la obra de escritores como Ricardo Palma (Genio y figura de Ricardo Palma, 1968), Vargas Llosa (Mario Vargas Llosa: la invención de una realidad, 1970; y Mario Vargas Llosa, 1981) o José Martí (La niña de Nueva York: una revisión de la vida erótica de José Martí, 1989); además ha realizado numerosas antologías, como Narradores peruanos (1968), Antología del cuento cubano (1968), Estos 13 (una recopilación de poesía de la generación peruana del 70, 1970), Musas en guerra (1987) o Antología crítica del cuento hispanoamericano del siglo XIX. 1830-1920 (1992). Son interesantes, y muy personales, los prólogos que ha escrito para obras de Sebastián Salazar Bondy, Ernesto Cardenal, José Emilio Pacheco y Ludwig Zeller, entre otros. Además está afrontando una obra total: Historia de la literatura hispanoamericana, de la que ya lleva publicados dos volúmenes: De los orígenes a la Emancipación (1995) y Del Romanticismo al Modernismo (1997). También ha incursionado en la ficción breve con los libros de cuentos: Soledad & Compañía (1987), La vida maravillosa (1988) y Cuaderno imaginario (1996).

Gabriel José de la Concordia Garcí­a Márquez was a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist. Garcí­a Márquez, familiarly known as "Gabo" in his native country, was considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century. In 1982, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He studied at the University of Bogotá and later worked as a reporter for the Colombian newspaper El Espectador and as a foreign correspondent in Rome, Paris, Barcelona, Caracas, and New York. He wrote many acclaimed non-fiction works and short stories, but is best-known for his novels, such as One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985). His works have achieved significant critical acclaim and widespread commercial success, most notably for popularizing a literary style labeled as magical realism, which uses magical elements and events in order to explain real experiences. Some of his works are set in a fictional village called Macondo, and most of them express the theme of solitude. Having previously written shorter fiction and screenplays, García Márquez sequestered himself away in his Mexico City home for an extended period of time to complete his novel Cien años de soledad, or One Hundred Years of Solitude, published in 1967. The author drew international acclaim for the work, which ultimately sold tens of millions of copies worldwide. García Márquez is credited with helping introduce an array of readers to magical realism, a genre that combines more conventional storytelling forms with vivid, layers of fantasy. Another one of his novels, El amor en los tiempos del cólera (1985), or Love in the Time of Cholera, drew a large global audience as well. The work was partially based on his parents' courtship and was adapted into a 2007 film starring Javier Bardem. García Márquez wrote seven novels during his life, with additional titles that include El general en su laberinto (1989), or The General in His Labyrinth, and Del amor y otros demonios (1994), or Of Love and Other Demons. (Arabic: جابرييل جارسيا ماركيز) (Hebrew: גבריאל גארסיה מרקס)