1.
Jorge Luis Borges
–
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo KBE was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish-language literature. Borges works have contributed to literature and the fantasy genre. However, some critics consider Borges to be a predecessor and not actually a magical realist and his late poems dialogue with such cultural figures as Spinoza, Camões, and Virgil. In 1914, Borges family moved to Switzerland, where he studied at the Collège de Genève, the family travelled widely in Europe, including Spain. On his return to Argentina in 1921, Borges began publishing his poems and he also worked as a librarian and public lecturer. In 1955, he was appointed director of the National Public Library and he became completely blind by the age of 55, as he never learned braille, he became unable to read. Scholars have suggested that his progressive blindness helped him to create innovative literary symbols through imagination, in 1961, he came to international attention when he received the first Formentor prize, which he shared with Samuel Beckett. In 1971, he won the Jerusalem Prize and his work was translated and published widely in the United States and Europe. Borges himself was fluent in several languages and he dedicated his final work, The Conspirators, to the city of Geneva, Switzerland. Writer and essayist J. M. Coetzee said of him, He, more than anyone, renovated the language of fiction, Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo was born into an educated middle-class family on 24 August 1899. They were in comfortable circumstances but not wealthy enough to live in downtown Buenos Aires so the family resided in Palermo, Borgess mother, Leonor Acevedo Suárez, came from a traditional Uruguayan family of criollo origin. Her family had been involved in the European settling of South America and the Argentine War of Independence. His 1929 book, Cuaderno San Martín, includes the poem Isidoro Acevedo, commemorating his grandfather, Isidoro de Acevedo Laprida, a soldier of the Buenos Aires Army. A descendant of the Argentine lawyer and politician Francisco Narciso de Laprida, de Acevedo Laprida fought in the battles of Cepeda in 1859, Pavón in 1861, de Acevedo Laprida died of pulmonary congestion in the house where his grandson Jorge Luis Borges was born. Borgess own father, Jorge Guillermo Borges Haslam was a lawyer, Borges Haslam was born in Entre Rios of Spanish, Portuguese, and English descent, the son of Francisco Borges Lafinur, a colonel, and Frances Ann Haslam, an Englishwoman. Borges Haslam grew up speaking English at home, the family frequently traveled to Europe. Borges Haslam wed Leonor Acevedo Suarez and was father of the painter Norah Borges. At age nine, Jorge Luis Borges translated Oscar Wildes The Happy Prince into Spanish and it was published in a local journal, but his friends thought the real author was his father
2.
Alfonsina Storni
–
Alfonsina Storni was one of the most important Argentine and Latin-American poets of the modernist period. Storni was born in Sala Capriasca, Switzerland, to Italian-Swiss parents, before her birth, her father had started a brewery in the city of San Juan, Argentina, producing beer and soda. In 1891, following the advice of a doctor, he returned with his wife to Switzerland, in 1896 the family returned to San Juan, and a few years later, in 1901, moved to Rosario. There her father opened a tavern, where Storni worked doing a variety of chores, in 1907, she joined a traveling theatre company which took her around the country. With them she performed in Henrik Ibsens Spectres, Benito Pérez Galdóss La loca de la casa, in 1908, Storni returned to live with her mother, who had remarried and was living in Bustinza. After a year there, Storni went to Coronda, where she undertook studies that would lead to employment as a primary schoolteacher. During this period she started working for the local magazines Mundo Rosarino. In 1912 she moved to Buenos Aires, seeking the anonymity afforded by a big city, the following year her son Alejandro was born, the illegitimate child of a journalist in Coronda. In spite of difficulties, she published La inquietud del rosal in 1916. Storni soon became acquainted with writers, such as José Enrique Rodó and Amado Nervo. Her economic situation improved, which allowed her to travel to Montevideo, there she met the poet Juana de Ibarbourou, as well as Horacio Quiroga, with whom she would become great friends. Her 1920 book Languidez received the first Municipal Poetry Prize and the second National Literature Prize and she taught literature at the Escuela Normal de Lenguas Vivas, and she published Ocre. Her style now showed more realism than before, and a strongly feminist theme, solitude and marginality began to affect her health, and worsening emotional problems forced her to leave her job as teacher. A year and a half after her friend Quiroga committed suicide in 1937, around 1,00 AM on Tuesday the 25th, Alfonsina left her room and headed towards the sea at La Perla beach in Mar del Plata, Argentina. Later that morning two workers found her body washed up on the beach, although her biographers hold that she jumped into the water from a breakwater, popular legend is that she slowly walked out to sea until she drowned. Also, fifty years after her death, she inspired the Latin American artist Aquino to incorporate her image into many of his paintings. Alfonsina Storni published some of her first works in 1916 in Emin Arslans literary magazine La Nota and her poems “Convalecer” and “Golondrinas” were published in the magazine. She was the winner of the First Municipal Poetry Prize and the second National Literature Prize for her book Languidez
3.
Gabriela Mistral
–
Gabriela Mistral was the pseudonym of Lucila Godoy y Alcayaga, a Chilean poet-diplomat, educator and humanist. Her portrait also appears on the 5,000 Chilean peso bank note, Mistral was born in Vicuña, Chile, but was raised in the small Andean village of Montegrande, where she attended a primary school taught by her older sister, Emelina Molina. She respected her sister greatly, despite the financial problems that Emelina brought her in later years. Her father, Juan Gerónimo Godoy Villanueva, was also a schoolteacher and he abandoned the family before she was three years old, and died, long since estranged from the family, in 1911. Throughout her early years she was never far from poverty, by age fifteen, she was supporting herself and her mother, Petronila Alcayaga, a seamstress, by working as a teachers aide in the seaside town of Compañia Baja, near La Serena, Chile. Probably in about 1906, while working as a teacher, Mistral met Romelio Ureta, a railway worker, who killed himself in 1909. The profound effects of death were already in the work, writing about his suicide led the poet to consider death. While Mistral had passionate friendships with men and women. She had been using the pen name Gabriela Mistral since June 1908 for much of her writing, after winning the Juegos Florales she infrequently used her given name of Lucila Godoy for her publications. Mistrals meteoric rise in Chiles national school system plays out against the politics of Chile in the first two decades of the 20th century. In her adolescence, the need for teachers was so great, and the number of trained teachers was so small, especially in the rural areas, the poet was able to rise from one post to another because of her publications in local and national newspapers and magazines. Her willingness to move was also a factor, between the years 1906 and 1912 she had taught, successively, in three schools near La Serena, then in Barrancas, then Traiguén in 1910, and in Antofagasta in the desert north, in 1911. By 1912 she had moved to work in a liceo, or high school, in Los Andes, in 1918 Pedro Aguirre Cerda, then Minister of Education, and a future president of Chile, promoted her appointment to direct a liceo in Punta Arenas. He had her join in the plan to reform libraries and schools. That year she published Desolación in New York, which promoted the international acclaim she had already been receiving thanks to her journalism. A year later she published Lecturas para Mujeres, a text in prose and verse that celebrates Latin America from the broad, following almost two years in Mexico she traveled from Laredo, Texas to Washington D. C. In early 1925 she returned to Chile, where she retired from the nations education system. The University of Chile had granted her the title of Spanish Professor in 1923
4.
Pablo Neruda
–
Pablo Neruda was the pen name and, later, legal name of the Chilean poet-diplomat and politician Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto. He derived his pen name from the Czech poet Jan Neruda, Neruda won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. Neruda became known as a poet when he was 10 years old and he often wrote in green ink, which was his personal symbol for desire and hope. The Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez once called Neruda the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language, harold Bloom included Neruda as one of the 26 writers central to the Western Tradition in his book The Western Canon. On July 15,1945, at Pacaembu Stadium in São Paulo, Brazil, during his lifetime, Neruda occupied many diplomatic positions and served a term as a Senator for the Chilean Communist Party. When President González Videla outlawed communism in Chile in 1948, a warrant was issued for Nerudas arrest, friends hid him for months in the basement of a house in the port city of Valparaíso. Later, Neruda escaped through a pass near Maihue Lake into Argentina. Years later, Neruda was an advisor to Chiles socialist President Salvador Allende. When Neruda returned to Chile after his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Neruda died in his house in Isla Negra on 23 September 1973 six and a half hours after that injection. Pinochet, backed by elements of the forces, denied permission for Nerudas funeral to be made a public event. However, thousands of grieving Chileans disobeyed the curfew and crowded the streets, soon after her death, Reyes moved to Temuco, where he married Trinidad Candia Marverde, a woman with whom he had had another child nine years earlier, a boy named Rodolfo. Neruda grew up in Temuco with Rodolfo and a half-sister, Laura and he composed his first poems in the winter of 1914. During this winter, he wrote often about dinosaurs, on July 18,1917, at the age of thirteen, he published his first work, an essay entitled Entusiasmo y perseverancia in the local daily newspaper La Mañana, signed Neftalí Reyes. From 1918 to mid-1920 he published poems, such as Mis ojos. In 1919, he participated in the literary contest Juegos Florales del Maule, by mid-1920, when he adopted the pseudonym Pablo Neruda, he was a published author of poems, prose, and journalism. He is thought to have named himself Neruda after the Czech poet Jan Neruda, the young poets intention in publishing under a pseudonym was to avoid his fathers disapproval of his poems. In 1921, at the age of 16, Neruda moved to Santiago to study French at the Universidad de Chile, both works were critically acclaimed and have been translated into many languages. Over the decades, Veinte poemas sold millions of copies and became Nerudas best-known work, almost one hundred years later, Veinte Poemas still retains its place as the best selling poetry book in the Spanish language
5.
Nobel Prize in Literature
–
Though individual works are sometimes cited as being particularly noteworthy, here work refers to an authors work as a whole. The Swedish Academy decides who, if anyone, will receive the prize in any given year, the academy announces the name of the chosen laureate in early October. Although the Nobel Prize in Literature has become the worlds most prestigious literature prize, many authors who have won the prize have fallen into obscurity, while others rejected by the jury remain widely studied and read. The prize has become seen as a political one - a peace prize in literary disguise, whose judges are prejudiced against authors with different political tastes to them. Tim Parks has expressed skepticism that it is possible for Swedish professors, as of 2016,16 of the 113 recipients have been of Scandinavian origin. The Academy has often been alleged to be biased towards European, Nobels vague wording for the criteria for the prize has led to recurrent controversy. In the original Swedish, the word translates as either idealistic or ideal. The Nobel Committees interpretation has varied over the years, in recent years, this means a kind of idealism championing human rights on a broad scale. Though Nobel wrote several wills during his lifetime, the last was written a little over a year before he died, Nobel bequeathed 94% of his total assets,31 million Swedish kronor, to establish and endow the five Nobel Prizes. Due to the level of surrounding the will, it was not until 26 April 1897 that the Storting approved it. The executors of his will were Ragnar Sohlman and Rudolf Lilljequist, the members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee that were to award the Peace Prize were appointed shortly after the will was approved. The prize-awarding organisations followed, the Karolinska Institutet on 7 June, the Swedish Academy on 9 June, the Nobel Foundation then reached an agreement on guidelines for how the Nobel Prize should be awarded. In 1900, the Nobel Foundations newly created statutes were promulgated by King Oscar II, according to Nobels will, the Royal Swedish Academy was to award the Prize in Literature. Each year, the Swedish Academy sends out requests for nominations of candidates for the Nobel Prize in Literature and it is not permitted to nominate oneself. Thousands of requests are sent out each year, and as of 2011 about 220 proposals are returned and these proposals must be received by the Academy by 1 February, after which they are examined by the Nobel Committee. By April, the Academy narrows the field to around twenty candidates, by May, a short list of five names is approved by the Committee. The subsequent four months are spent in reading and reviewing the works of the five candidates. In October, members of the Academy vote and the candidate who receives more than half of the votes is named the Nobel laureate in Literature
.jpg)