Carlos Fuentes (1928-2012) was one of the most influential and celebrated voices in Latin American literature. He was the author of 24 novels, including "Aura", "The Death of Artemio Cruz", "The Old Gringo" and "Terra Nostra", and also wrote numerous plays, short stories, and essays. He received the 1987 Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's highest literary honor. Fuentes was born in Panama City, the son of Mexican parents, and moved to Mexico as a teenager. He served as an ambassador to England and France, and taught at universities including Harvard, Princeton, Brown and Columbia. He died in Mexico City in 2012. Margaret Sayers Peden is a distinguished critic and translator of Latin American literature. The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera was born in Brno and has lived in France, his second homeland, since 1975. He is the author of the novels The Joke, Farewell Waltz, Life Is Elsewhere, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality, and the short-story collection Laughable Loves all originally written in Czech. His most recent novels Slowness, Identity, and Ignorance, as well as his nonfiction works The Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed, The Curtain, and Encounter, were originally written in French. Jorge Volpi (Mexico, 1968), reconocido escritor perteneciente a la llamada Generacion del Crack, obtuvo por su novela En busca de Klingsor el Premio Biblioteca Breve en 1999. Por La tejedora de sombras le fue otorgado en 2012 el Premio Planeta-Casa de America. Otras novelas suyas son A pesar del oscuro silencio (1993), La paz de los sepulcros (1995) y El fin de la locura (2003), No sera la Tierra (2006), Oscuro bosque oscuro (2009) y Memorial del engano (2014). Ha cultivado el ensayo con obras como La imaginacion y el poder. Una historia intelectual de 1968 y La guerra y las palabras. Una historia intelectual de 1994. En 2009 recibio el premio Jose Donoso de Chile al conjunto de su obra. Su obra literaria se ha traducido a mas de una veintena de idiomas.