Biographies. Bibliography

Osvaldo Soriano

Osvaldo Soriano (1943-1997) was an Argentine writer and journalist born in Mar del Plata. His novels, short stories, and chronicles combined humor with political violence and the experience of the defeated. Exiled during the dictatorship and associated with Página/12 from its founding, he built a body of work widely read in Argentina and abroad.

Timeline

A childhood on the move

Osvaldo Soriano was born on January 6, 1943, in Mar del Plata. He was the only child of Eugenia Goñi, who was born in Tandil, and José Vicente Soriano, a Catalan who worked as an inspector for Obras Sanitarias. His father’s work assignments took the family to various cities, including San Luis, Río Cuarto, Cipolletti, and Tandil. That childhood of frequent moves later resurfaced in his stories, in which the father figure held a central place.

He did not finish high school. He worked packing apples and later as a night watchman at a metalworking factory in Tandil, where he began writing short stories during his overnight shifts. Before considering literature, he had wanted to become a soccer player: he played for teams in the Alto Valle and supported San Lorenzo. His sustained engagement with books began around the age of twenty, among friends involved in theater and a film club in Tandil; he read Cortázar and sent him one of his early stories.

Learning in the newsroom

Journalism gave him a trade and a place to develop his writing. He began at El Eco de Tandil, writing sports articles and profiles, and in 1969 moved to Primera Plana in Buenos Aires. He later worked at Panorama and La Opinión, Jacobo Timerman’s newspaper. There he wrote, among other pieces, a reconstruction of the Robledo Puch case based on the available testimony: a crime chronicle published in the cultural supplement of a newspaper that avoided crime reporting.

In 1973 he published his first novel, Triste, solitario y final (Sad, Solitary and Final). It brought together two longstanding passions: cinema and American crime fiction. A character named Osvaldo Soriano met Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler’s detective, in Los Angeles while investigating the life of Stan Laurel. This fictional invention mixed real people with literary characters, making the displacement and obscurity of former movie idols part of the story.

Writing far from home

In 1974 he wrote No habrá más penas ni olvido (Funny Dirty Little War), but could not get it published in Argentina at the time. The novel set a struggle between opposing factions of Peronism in Colonia Vela, an imaginary town. Its characters invoked a shared political identity as they moved toward increasingly uncontrollable violence. The book had been written before his exile, although it began appearing in print only after Soriano had left the country.

After the 1976 coup d’état, he settled in Brussels, where he met Catherine Brucher, his partner. In 1978 they moved to Paris. From Europe he continued working as a journalist and contributed to publications such as Il Manifesto; in 1979 he joined Julio Cortázar and Carlos Gabetta in creating Sin Censura. The publication brought exiles together and disseminated information about and denunciations of Latin American dictatorships.

During those years he wrote Cuarteles de invierno (Winter Quarters), also set in Colonia Vela, now under military rule. A tango singer and a boxer arrived, hired for a celebration, and discovered that they could not simply work, collect their pay, and leave. Both novels first circulated in translation; their first Spanish editions appeared in Barcelona: No habrá más penas ni olvido in March 1980 and Cuarteles de invierno in March 1982. The second portrayed coercion through the experience of two men who initially believed themselves to be outside politics.

The return and his readers

His books began reaching a wide readership in Argentina before his exile ended. In 1983 Artistas, locos y criminales (1983) appeared, collecting his journalism for La Opinión, and Héctor Olivera adapted No habrá más penas ni olvido for the screen. Soriano settled in Argentina again in 1984, accompanied by Brucher. That same year saw the release of the film adaptation of Cuarteles de invierno, directed by Lautaro Murúa.

In A sus plantas rendido un león (1986), he shifted the action to an invented African country, Bongwutsi. There, during the Falklands War, an Argentine consul waged his own battle against England while a revolutionary conspiracy followed another course. The geographical distance allowed him to revisit Argentine politics through an adventure built on misunderstandings. In 1987 he took part in founding Página/12: from then until his death, his back-page pieces, short stories, and political commentary kept him in regular contact with readers.

Roads, spies, and memories

With Una sombra ya pronto serás (Shadows) (1990), Soriano followed a computer engineer traveling along Argentine roads and through towns without finding a destination. The journey brought him into contact with other, equally directionless characters. In El ojo de la patria (1992), by contrast, he turned to an espionage plot featuring Julio Carré, an Argentine agent in Paris. The manipulation of identities and of the remains of national heroes allowed him to direct his satire toward the relationship between national history and power.

In 1993 he published Cuentos de los años felices (1993), in which childhood memories and the figure of his father appeared alongside historical and soccer stories. It was not a continuous autobiography: Soriano explained that, as he wrote, he shifted memories from one age to another and transformed them into fiction. That year he received the Raymond Chandler award in Italy; in 1994 he received the Diploma al Mérito from the Konex awards. This recognition coexisted with critical debates about his work, frequently shaped by the opposition between popular success and literary experimentation.

The final books

His last novel, La hora sin sombra, appeared in 1995. In it he returned to the journey through Argentina, this time with a writer and his relationship with his father at the center of the story. In 1996 he published Piratas, fantasmas y dinosaurios (1996), a new collection of fiction, chronicles, and profiles. He died in Buenos Aires on January 29, 1997, at the age of fifty-four.

Soriano’s readership did not remain confined to those who had followed him during his lifetime. The reissues begun by Seix Barral in 2003 brought his books back into circulation, and his texts also found their way into school reading programs and workshops on narrative journalism. The new 2026 editions of Triste, solitario y final and Una sombra ya pronto serás extended that publishing presence. His work continued to offer different points of entry: political history, adventure stories, and that realm where personal experience becomes a story.

Main works