Abel Posse
Abel Parentini Posse was born on 7 January 1934, in the Argentine city of Córdoba where he only lived the first two years of his life. Two years after birth the family moved to the capital city of Buenos Aires due to his father's work commitments. His mother, Elba Alicia Posse, belonged to the creole landed oligarchy of Galician descent who held vast sugar mill estates in the North West province of Tucuman. Amongst the influential members of the Posse clan in the 19th century, the liberal Julio Argentino Roca stands out, twice president of the republic from 1880 to 1886 and also 1898 to 1904 (3). Posse fictionalized 19th century Tucuman in his novel El inquietante día de la vida (2001), where two distant family relatives are the protagonists; his maternal great-grandfather, Felipe Segundo Posse, and Julio Victor Posse, patron of the arts in the sugar producing province until the 1940s.
Abel Posse
He is the author of fourteen novels, seven collections of essays, an extensive journalistic work, together with a series of short stories and poems. His narrative fiction has received several distinguished awards. He received encouraging praise for his early novels, Los bogavantes (1970) and La boca del tigre (1971), for which he was awarded the Honour Sash of the SADE (Argentine Society of Writers) and third prize of the National Prize of Argentine Literature respectively. Worldwide acclaim came later for his “Trilogy of the Discovery of America” when he was recognised as one of the masters of Latin America's “New Historical Novel”. The first installment is Daimon (1978), a finalist of the Rómulo Gallegos Prize in 1982, which he was to win in 1987 for the sequel titled The dogs of paradise (1983). The last installment of the trilogy, El largo atardecer del caminante (1992) was honoured with the Premio Internacional Extremadura-America ’92 of the Spanish Commission for the Fifth Centenary of the Discovery of America. Posse has been the recipient of the Premio Internacional de Novela Diana-Novedades (Mexico) for El viajero de Agartha (1989) and the Literature Prize of the Argentine Academy of Letters (2002) for El inquietante dia de la vida (2001). Abel Posse's novels have been translated into 16 languages. In November 2012 he became an numbered member of the Argentine Academy of Letters.