One of Galeano’s early works, Open Veins of Latin America (1971), received an unexpected publicity boost in 2009 when Hugo Chávez, president of Venezuela, thrust a copy into the hands of the US president, Barack Obama, at a summit meeting in Trinidad. He was famous for pioneering a form of political essay built on his encyclopedic knowledge of Latin America’s past, and his writings bear some comparison with the similarly innovative works of Ryszard Kapuściński and Sven Lindqvist. Although Galeano wrote novels, he was a radical journalist by trade, a poet and an artist, and a brilliant editor. Born in neglected Uruguay, he was a significant part of the “boom” generation of the 1960s, inspired by the Cuban revolution, that put Latin American fiction on the global map.

This celebrated series is a landmark of contemporary Latin American writing, and a brilliant document of culture.Eduardo Galeano, who has died aged 74, was one of the great writers of Latin America his unusual and idiosyncratic works served to illuminate the history and politics of the entire continent. And in the final installment, Century of the Wind, Galeano brings his story into the twentieth century, in which a fractured continent enters the modern age as popular revolts blaze from North to South. The second book, Faces and Masks, spans the two centuries between the years 17, in which colonial powers plundered their newfound territories, ultimately giving way to a rising tide of dictators. The first book, Genesis, pays homage to the many origin stories of the tribes of the Americas, and paints a verdant portrait of life in the New World through the age of the conquistadors. The three volumes form a haunting and dizzying whole that resurrects the lives of Indians, conquistadors, slaves, revolutionaries, poets, and more. It is a passionate, razor-sharp, lyrical history of North and South America, from the birth of the continent’s indigenous peoples through the end of the twentieth century.

All three books in the American Book Award–winning Memory of Fire Trilogy available in a single volume for the first time.Įduardo Galeano’s Memory of Fire Trilogy defies categorization-or perhaps creates its own.

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