Which Paraguayan author wrote 'I, the Supreme'?

Augusto Roa Bastos wrote the Paraguayan novel I, the Supreme. Published in Spanish as Yo el Supremo in 1974, it is a fictionalized account of José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, Paraguay’s authoritarian ruler from 1814 until his death in 1840.

The novel belongs to the Latin American dictator-novel tradition and is also associated with the Latin American Boom. Roa Bastos uses Francia’s rule to examine political power, historical memory, censorship, and the relationship between speech and writing. The story is presented through several forms, including dictation, notebooks, dialogues, official documents, and commentary by the dictator’s secretary, Patiño.

Readers sometimes confuse the book’s author with its historical subject. Francia, known as “El Supremo,” is the figure portrayed in the novel, not its writer. The work is also often read as an indirect criticism of Alfredo Stroessner’s dictatorship, which governed Paraguay for much of the twentieth century. Roa Bastos’s opposition to authoritarianism contributed to his long exile, and he later won Spain’s Miguel de Cervantes Prize in 1989.