Álvaro Cepeda Samudio

Short Biography

Álvaro Cepeda Samudio (March 30, 1926 – October 12, 1972) was a Colombian journalist, novelist, short story writer, and filmmaker. Within Colombia and the rest of Latin America, he is known in his own right as an important and innovative writer and journalist, largely inspiring much of the artistically, intellectually and politically active climate for which this particular time and place, that of mid-century Colombia, has become known. His fame is considerably more quaint outside his home country, where it derives primarily from his standing as having been part of the influential artistic and intellectual circle in Colombia in which fellow writer and journalist Gabriel García Márquez—with whom he was also a member of the more particularized Barranquilla Group—and painter Alejandro Obregón also played prominent roles. Only one of his works, La casa grande, has received considerable notice beyond the Spanish-speaking world, having been translated into several languages, English and French among them; his fame as a writer has therefore been significantly curtailed in the greater international readership, as the breadth of his literary and journalistic output has reached few audiences beyond those of Latin America and Latin American literary scholars.