Luis de Lión was born in San Juan del Obispo, Guatemala, in 1940, and is considered Guatemala's first indigenous writer in Spanish. His novel El tiempo principia en Xibalbá, written in 1972 but published posthumously in 1985, is among the most important Central American literary works; his other books included the short-story collections Los zopilotes (1966), Su segunda muerte (1970), and La puerta del cielo y otras puertas (1995), and two collections of poetry. An active member of the Guatemalan Labor Party, he was kidnapped by armed men in 1984 and never seen again, one of the more than 30,000 disappeared by Guatemalan military forces.