The writer and journalist Tomás Eloy Martínez was born in Tucumán, Argentina, in 1934. As a young man he won various prizes for his poems and short stories. He has published a number of novels and short stories and written several film scripts and an essay on cinema. His novel Santa Evita (1995) established Tomás Eloy Martínez as one of the most internationally acclaimed Argentinean writers. Translated into twenty-five languages and published in more than thirty countries, Santa Evita is regarded as one of the great achievements of contemporary Latin American writing, and has been praised by other major prose writers such as Carlos Fuentes, Augusto Roa Bastos, and Gabriel García Márquez. Other books written by him include La novela de Perón and El vuelo de la reina, for which he won the prestigious Alfaguara Prize for the Novel in 2002.