Eduardo Galeano was born on September 3, 1940 in Montevideo, Uruguay. At the age of 13, he began publishing cartoons for the Uruguayan socialist newspaper El Sol. He worked as a journalist, historian, and political activist. While in his early 30s, he was imprisoned during a right-wing military coup and later forced to flee from Uruguay to Argentina. Later, another coup and several death threats forced him to leave Argentina for Spain where he lived in exile until he was permitted to return to Uruguay in 1984.
During his lifetime, he wrote numerous fiction and non-fiction works including Days and Nights of Love and War, Football in Sun and Shadow, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, Guatemala: Occupied Country, The Book of Embraces, and Children of the Days. In 1989, he won the American Book Award for Memory of Fire. He died of cancer on April 13, 2015 at the age of 74.
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