Alberto Laiseca (1941-2016), Argentinian writer. He has the honor of having penned the longest novel in Spanish, deliberately longer than Joyce's Ulysses - it's called The Sorias and it tells the story of three dictatorships. He has also written many anthologies of short stories (Killing Dwarves with Sticks), other novels (The Top Worm of Life Itself) and one sex manual focusing on S&M practices which I own. In his youth he worked many odd jobs and did plenty of sports. He famously tried to join the US Army in the Vietnam war but he was deemed insane at the embassy. Recently he had been forcibly committed by his daughter to a nursing home.
He was also an occasional actor, particularly in the films of his friends Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat, and is remembered by most people for his popular segment in the Argentinian network I-Sat in which he re-told famous horror stories by Poe, Maupassant or Quiroga, sitting in a chair and smoking cigarettes. He often did this in public as well in cementeries and parks. He was particularly obsessed with Gothic authors and themes. His novella Drinking Red focuses on those themes and is almost an essay on Horror fiction more than a story itself. I never met Laiseca personally but many of my friends had gone to his writing workshop (which, previous to the internation, was his only source of money) or sought friendship with him because he was famously jovial with anyone who came with a drink in his hand. As I said, I wasn't among those who spent time talking with him but I've read him often and he's the sort of writer who puts himself into his work so that it's hard not to consider him a friend.
I hope his work gets translated to English and you can all enjoy it. I hear from a friend that he completed a novel about the small village he was born in while in the nursing home.
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Quoting Morris Schæffer 
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