Writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante dies in at 75

LONDON - Cuban-born novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante, widely regarded as one of the most original voices in 20th-century Spanish-language literature, has died in London. He was 75.

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Cabrera died in a hospital Monday from septicemia, said Carmen Pinilla, a spokeswoman for his literary agents, the Balcells agency in Barcelona, Spain.

The writer, a London resident since 1966, had suffered a series of illnesses in recent years including diabetes as well as heart and kidney problems, Pinilla said in a phone interview Tuesday. She added that Cabrera's wife Miriam was by his side when he died.

Cabrera had long been lauded for his experimental use of language in his novels, essays and cinema criticism, and he won the 1997 Miguel de Cervantes prize for literature, the most prestigious literary award in the Spanish-speaking world.

"Perhaps his greatest originality was to turn cinema criticism into a new literary genre," Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, who served on the jury that awarded the prize, said of Cabrera.

Cabrera's most famous novel, "Three Trapped Tigers," was published in 1967. "Its success surprised me. It is half written in Cuban (slang) and so most readers won't understand" the author said in an interview with The Associated Press after winning the Cervantes prize.

Other titles include the author's personal favorite, "Twentieth Century Job" published in 1963, "Holy Smoke," published in English in 1985, and the 1997 essay "Cinema or Sardine."

Cabrera also wrote screenplays, including the adaptation of Malcolm Lowry's "Under the Volcano" for the film directed by John Houston.

Cabrera, born in Gibara, Cuba in 1929, was a founding member of the magazine "Revolucion" in 1959 and served as the revolutionary Cuban government's cultural attache in Brussels in 1962.

But Cabrera became a harsh critic of the Castro regime, publishing a collection of political writings under the title "Mea Cuba" in 1991.

"I have not been back (to Cuba) since I left in 1965 and will not until Fidel Castro leaves power" he said in 1997.

Cabrera settled in London and took on British citizenship.

Cabrera had two daughters from his first wife, who divorced him in 1961. He remarried later that year.