Ricardo Piglia


Ricardo Piglia was an Argentine author, critic, and scholar best known for introducing hard-boiled fiction to the Argentine public.

Biography

Born in Adrogué, Piglia was raised in Mar del Plata. He studied history in 1961-1962 at the National University of La Plata.
Ricardo Piglia published his first collection of fiction in 1967, La invasión. He worked in various publishing houses in Buenos Aires and was in charge of the Serie Negra which published well-known authors of crime fiction including Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, David Goodis and Horace McCoy. A fan of American literature, he was also influenced by F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner, as well as by European authors Franz Kafka and Robert Musil.
Piglia's fiction includes several collections of short stories as well as highly allusive crime novels, among them Respiración artificial, La ciudad ausente, and Blanco nocturno. His criticism has been collected in Criticism and Fiction, Brief Forms and The Last Reader.
Piglia resided for a number of years in the United States. He taught Latin American literature at Harvard as well as Princeton University, where he was Walter S. Carpenter Professor of Language, Literature, and Civilization of Spain from 2001 to 2011. After retirement he returned with his wife to Argentina.
In 2013 he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis; he died of the disease on January 6, 2017, in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Awards and honors

During his lifetime Piglia received a number of awards, including the Premio internacional de novela Rómulo Gallegos, Premio Iberoamericano de las Letras, Premio Planeta, and the Casa de las Américas Prize. In 2013 he won Chile's Manuel Rojas Ibero-American Narrative Award, and in 2014 he won the Diamond Konex Award as the best writer of the decade in Argentina.
On January 4, 2018, his memory was honored in New York City at "Modos infintos de narrar: Homenaje a Ricardo Piglia," an event at which academics discussed the impact of his work on Latin American literature and intellectual history and his legacy as a literary critic and scholar.

Works

Essays
Novels
Short story collections
Others