MONTEVIDEO, April 15 — Uruguay paid a final tribute yesterday to leftist writer Eduardo Galeano, an incisive critic of Latin America's injustices who died of lung cancer aged 74.

Galeano, author of Open Veins of Latin America, a regional history that shaped a generation of leftist activists in the turbulent 1970s and 80s, died Monday in the Uruguayan capital Montevideo after several days in a hospital.

His body lay in state yesterday in the Congress building, where Uruguayans filed past his flag-draped casket to pay their last respects before a burial later in the day.

As tributes came in from leaders, writers and activists around Latin America, Uruguayan President Tabare Vazquez said he considered Galeano a “transcendent personality” whose appeal crossed borders, the leader's office said in a statement.

The Senate declared Galeano a “brilliant representative of national literature.”

Galeano was known for chronicling the deep inequality and traumatic history of Latin America in a career that spanned decades and crossed genres including journalism, fiction, essays and drawings.

Briefly imprisoned when a military-backed dictatorship took control of Uruguay in 1973, he fled into exile in Argentina and then Spain.

He returned to Uruguay after democracy was restored in 1985 and lived to see Vazquez's leftwing Broad Front (FA) party come to power in 2005.

He won the prestigious Casa de las Americas prize twice, in 1975 and 1978, Sweden's Stig-Dagerman prize in 2010 and an American Book Award in 1989 for his Memory of Fire trilogy.

But his defining work remains Open Veins, which has been translated into more than 20 languages.

Galeano's publisher, Spanish firm Siglo XXI, said it would posthumously publish two last books: Women, a compilation set for release tomorrow in Spain, and another later this year. — AFP