Which Argentine author wrote the novel 'The Invention of Morel'?

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Which Argentine author wrote the novel “The Invention of Morel”? Adolfo Bioy Casares wrote it.

Published in Spanish in 1940 as La invención de Morel, the novel follows a fugitive hiding on a strange island where visitors and events seem to repeat. Its science-fiction premise involves an invention that records people, voices, scents, and surroundings so completely that the recordings appear indistinguishable from reality.

Bioy Casares was born in Buenos Aires in 1914 and became one of Argentina’s leading writers of fantastic, detective, and speculative fiction. The book was his breakthrough work and won Buenos Aires’s First Municipal Prize for Literature in 1941. Jorge Luis Borges, Bioy’s lifelong friend and collaborator, wrote its famous introduction and praised its tightly constructed plot.

A common mix-up is attributing the novel to Borges because of that introduction and their close association. Julio Cortázar and Manuel Puig were also major Argentine writers, but neither wrote this novel. The book has influenced films and television, including frequent comparisons with Last Year at Marienbad and Lost.

Source: Wikipedia · fact-checked Sept. 2026

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