Ernesto Sabato
Argentine writer, painter and physicist (1911-2011) · Argentina · On the map · Writers · Died at 99
He walked away from physics at the Curie Institute to write three novels - just three, across five decades - and the second nearly went into the fire before becoming what many call the greatest Argentine novel of the 20th century.
Ernesto Sabato is read about 333 times a day, in 55 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 12 November 2026
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 400 days, one point a day.
Something wrong?A life in dates
People around Ernesto
Family
Is this everyone?
Only relatives with a profile here are drawn, so a family can be larger than this. A line here can also be wrong.
Correct this familyMedia & music
Awards
About this person
Sabato was born in 1911 in Rojas, a small town in Buenos Aires Province, and trained as a physicist, earning a PhD at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata before working at the Sorbonne and the Curie Institute in Paris. After World War II he abandoned science and turned to fiction. His first novel, El Túnel, appeared in 1948 and drew praise from Albert Camus and Thomas Mann. Sobre héroes y tumbas followed in 1961 - he nearly destroyed it, but it survived to become his masterpiece. A third novel, Abaddón el exterminador, came in 1974. His essays ranged across metaphysics, politics, and tango, and the prizes accumulated: the Cervantes, the Legion of Honour, the Jerusalem Prize. In 1983, President Raúl Alfonsín asked him to lead CONADEP, the commission investigating the disappeared of the Dirty War; its report, Nunca Más, appeared in 1984. He died in 2011 at 99, by then called the last classic writer in Argentine literature.
