Silvina Ocampo

Silvina Inocencia Ocampo was born on July 28, 1903, in Buenos Aires, the youngest sister of Victoria Ocampo. She studied drawing and painting in Paris with Giorgio de Chirico and Fernand Léger before turning to literature, marrying author Adolfo Bioy Casares in 1940.

Together with Bioy Casares and close friend Jorge Luis Borges, Ocampo co-edited the landmark 1940 Antología de la literatura fantástica. Her short story collections—such as Viaje olvidado (1937), Autobiografía de Irene (1948), and La furia (1959)—stand as masterworks of psychological subversion, dark humor, and uncanny childhood cruelty. Italo Calvino wrote that he knew no other writer who captured the magical, unsettling world of children with such uncanny genius.