Liliana Heker was born in Buenos Aires in 1943. She began her professional writing career at seventeen with the support of Abelardo Castillo; her first short story "Los juegos" (1960) appeared in the magazine El grillo de papel and appeared later in her first book of short stories, Los que vieron la zarza (1966). She has published five volumes of short stories and two novels. Heker has gathered all of her short stories in the book Los bordes de lo real (1991), and is author of the essay "Diálogos sobre la vida y la muerte" (2000), which includes an interview with Jorge Luis Borges. During the Argentine Dirty War of state-sponsored violence in the 1970s and 1980s she wrote and edited left-wing literary journals, used veiled critiques as a means of protest, and engaged in vigorous debate with exiled writers such as Julio Cortázar. Her short stories have been translated into English and have also been published in Germany, Russia, Turkey, the Netherlands, Canada, and Poland.