MADRID – Argentine writer Tomas Eloy Martinez died over the weekend after a long battle with cancer, the Clarin newspaper reported on its Web site. He was 75.

Eloy Martinez, who died on Sunday, was the author of “Santa Evita,” the most translated Argentine novel in history, and “La Novela de Peron” (The Peron Novel) which relates the life of deceased Argentine President Juan Domingo Peron (1946-1955 and 1973-1974) and his second wife, Eva Peron.

Writer, journalist and university professor, Tomas Eloy Martinez was born in Tucuman, Argentina, in 1934.

He is considered one of the best Argentine journalists of the 1960s and the first years of the 1970s, when journalism attempted to capture the national hysteria with infinitely detailed reporting.

For his accounts of crimes committed by the military dictatorship (1976-1983), the military regime forced him into exile. After years in Venezuela, he moved to the United States where he became a professor at the University of Maryland and contributed to a number of media including The New York Times.

Notable among the works of Eloy Martinez were “Sagrado” (Sacred) in 1969, “Lugar Comun la Muerte” (Commonplace Death) in 1979, “La Pasion segun Trelew” (The Passion according to Trelew) in 1974, “La Mano del Amo” (The Master’s Hand) in 1991, “Santa Evita” (St. Evita) in 1995 and “Las Memorias del General” (Memoirs of the General) in 1996.

In 2002 he was awarded the Alfaguara Prize for the Novel for his work “El Vuelo de la Reina” (The Flight of the Queen) and in 2009 he was honored with the Ortega y Gasset Journalism Prize for his outstanding professional career, awarded by the Spanish daily El Pais.

Last year he published “Purgatorio” (Purgatory), his final work, with which he sought to awaken readers to the fact that the “cruelest” dictatorships are not possible without the complicity of society, as he once said in an interview with Efe. EFE