Writer and journalist Tomás Eloy Martínez was born in Tucumán, Argentina in 1934. He has published various novels, short stories and essays, as well as having written several film scripts. His novel Santa Evita (1995) established him as one of Argentina’s most internationally acclaimed writers. Translated into 25 languages and published in more than 30 countries, it is regarded as one of the great achievements of contemporary Latin‐American narrative, and has been publicly lauded by a host of names including those of Carlos Fuentes, Augusto Roa Bastos and Gabriel García Márquez.

He has also published a further four novels, translated into over ten languages. These include: LA MANO DEL AMO (1991), EL VUELO DE LA REINA (2002), EL CANTOR DE TANGO (2004) and PURGATORIO (2008). In 2002, EL VUELO DE LA REINA was awarded with the Alfaguara Novel Prize, and the following year with the award of ‘Best Foreign Novel’ by the People’s Literary Publication House of Beijing‐ Shanghai.

In 2005 he was a finalist of the Man International Booker Prize for his lifetime’s work. Throughout his lifetime, Tomás Eloy Martínez amassed a body of work so remarkable that it has since been hailed by The New York Times and the London Review of Books as ‘the most important literary phenomenon in Latin America since Gabriel García Márquez’s ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE.’

From 1991 until his death in February 2010, Martínez was a distinguished professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey and a regular contributor to The New York Times Syndicate, El Pais in Madrid, and La Nacion in Buenos Aries.