Juan Rulfo

Rulfo lost his father to a killing and his mother to illness before he was ten, grew up in an orphanage in Guadalajara, and spent his working life as a tyre-company salesman and later at the National Indigenous Institute, travelling the country and photographing it. He published a book of stories, El Llano en llamas, in 1953, and a short novel, Pedro Páramo, in 1955, and then essentially stopped, which he was asked about for the next thirty years and answered with a shrug.

Pedro Páramo is set in Comala, a village to which a son goes looking for his father and finds only the dead, who talk. It broke the boundary between the living and the dead and between one time and another so completely that Gabriel García Márquez said he could recite it from memory and that reading it unblocked him for One Hundred Years of Solitude; Borges called it one of the finest novels in Spanish. Rulfo also left some six thousand photographs of rural Mexico, austere and unsentimental, which are now regarded as a body of work in their own right. He died of lung cancer at sixty-eight in Mexico City. Where he was buried is not recorded in the standard reference works, so the pin here is San Gabriel in Jalisco, the town he grew up in and the country his two books are made of.