Severo Sarduy was a Cuban poet, author, playwright, and critic of Cuban literature and art.
Sarduy became close friends with Roland Barthes, Philippe Sollers, and other writers connected with journal Tel Quel. His third novel, Cobra (1972), translated by Sollers won the Prix Medicis for a work of foreign literature in translation. In addition to his own writing, Sarduy edited, published and promoted the work of many other Spanish and Latin American authors first at Editions Seuil and then Editions Gallimard.
In Sarduy's 1993 obituary in The Independent, James Kirkup wrote, "Sarduy was a genius with words, one of the great contemporary stylists writing in Spanish. ... Sarduy will be remembered chiefly for his brilliant, unpredictable, iconoclastic and often grimly funny novels, works of a totally liberated imagination composed by a master of disciplined Spanish style. He encompassed the sublime and the ridiculous, mingling oral traditions with literary mannerisms adopted from his baroque masters.