Books set in Uruguay

About the literature of Uruguay

Uruguay's national epic is Tabaré, a long poem published in 1888 by Juan Zorrilla de San Martín, who is widely regarded as the country's national poet. Writers in Uruguay work in Spanish, and much of the modern literature is shaped by the military dictatorship of 1973 to 1985, which sent many writers to prison or into exile. Its best-known writers abroad include Juan Carlos Onetti, winner of the Cervantes Prize in 1980, and Eduardo Galeano.

Start with Carolina De Robertis's The Invisible Mountain, in which three generations of women live through a century of Uruguayan history, from rural immigrant life to Montevideo and the dictatorship. Mario Benedetti's Springtime in a Broken Mirror portrays political prisoners and exiles in the 1970s, and the families waiting for them. Mauricio Rosencof, a Tupamaro leader, recalls prison and Jewish immigrant Montevideo in The Letters That Never Came.