Pablo De Santis: Author–Argentina

Pablo De Santis was born in Buenos Aires in 1963. When he was nineteen years old, he started working as a journalist and comic scriptwriter. In 1991, he published his first book for young people: From the eyes of the fish. In 1992, together with the designer Juan Manuel Lima, De Santis created the collection La Movida (The Move), a series of books aimed at adolescent readers. From that moment, De Santis published numerous texts that have ensured his acclaim as a reference of the best literature for young people.

De Santis has been included in the IBBY Honor List for his books The Seeker of Endings (2010) and The True Business of Mr. Trapani (2014). He received the ALIJA Highlights award, the KONEX Award as the best author of literature for young people in the decade 1994–2004, and the Planeta-Casa de las Américas award in 2007. He also received Academia Argentina de Letras Award in 2008 and the National Literature Prize in 2012.

His books have been translated into Italian and Portuguese. The most prominent books are Lucas Lenz and the Museum of the Universe, The Games Maker, The Seeker of Endings, Late Night, and The Snow Game. As stated by Marcelo Birmajer, "De Santis is a writer. For thirty years, he has transmitted laughter, suspense, curiosity and desire for adventure to thousands of adolescents." Birmajer also argues that plenty of De Santis's books for young people are already classics in Latin America and Spain. and that some of his short-stories seem to have been inspired by dreams, while others resemble poems.

Add to this Graciela Pérez Aguilar's assessment that, "A large part of Pablo De Santis' work is full of clues that lead to strange worlds, which are eventually central for reading, writing and for life itself." Most succinctly, however, De Santis himself expresses his thought on the creative process with the following words:

They are isolated ideas: islands which have to be joined in an archipelago. Little by little coincidences are being seen and what seems an accumulation of casual inventions take shape. The elements of fiction start to "rime," tone appears. Author work with logic, with the sense of logic that one may have, but beneath, the unconscious is constantly incorporating things which do not seem to fit anywhere…but then they fit. Writing—especially novel writing—is like children's games, where the most incongruent objects are finally incorporated and make sense.