Antonio di Benedetto

(1922 - 1986)

Two decades after publishing Zama, a historical novel about an imperial administrator in colonial Paraguay, Antonio di Benedetto was imprisoned during the Argentine Dirty War. From March 1976 to September 1977, he was tortured and put in front of a firing squad for mock executions, continuing to write fiction in handwriting decipherable only with a magnifying glass. “I’ll never be sure whether I was jailed for something I published,” he recalled. “That uncertainty is the worst of the tortures.”