Place of Culture

The University of San Marcos in Lima was founded in 1551, U de Mexico was founded in 1552, Harvard in 1636, Université Laval in 1663, U of New Brunswick 1785, McGill U 1821, King´s College (U of T) 1827The US and Canada have 8+2 Nobel Prize winners in Literature. Latin American and the Caribbean have 6 + 2

Gabriela Mistral 1945Chile (1889 Compañia Baja, near La Serena-Long Island, US 1957)

The first Women to Receiv NP

• The first woman who received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1909 was Swedish woman Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerlof "in appreciation of the lofty idealism, vivid imagination and spiritual perception that characterize her writings"

• The second woman who received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1926 was Brazia Deledda from Sardinia. This Italian woman had grade 4 in formal education. She was recognized "for her idealistically inspired writings which with plastic clarity picture the life on her native island and with depth and sympathy deal with human problems in general"

• Pearl Buck was the first US woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1938 "for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces." As we know, she was born in the States but grew up in China where her parents were missionaries.

Major Works

• Desolación, published in 1922.

• In 1924 came Ternura (Tenderness), which contains lullabies and rhymes for children.

• In 1938 Tala (Felling), which employs unusual imagery and free verse.

Diplomatic work

• Consul in Spain, Italy, Portugal, Brazil, Mexico and the United States

• Also worked as educator in Mexico.

• Worked as a journalist.

Miguel Angel Asturias 1967Guatemala (1899 Guatemala City-1974 Madrid)

Major works

• Leyendas de Guatemala(Legends of Guatemala; 1930)(Asturias was half Maya half Spanish)

• El Señor Presidente (written in 1933, published in 1946)

• Hombres de Maiz or Men of Corn (1949)

• Mulata de tal (1960)

Diplomatic work

• Asturias worked as a journalist before serving in his country's diplomatic corps

• 1942 elected to the Guatemalan Congress

• Held diplomatic posts in Bueno Aires in 1947 and in Paris in 1952

• Between 1946 and 1954 was Ambassador to Mexico, Argentina and El Salvador

• He helped found an affordable university.

Pablo Neruda, 1971Chile (Parral 1904-Santiago 1973)

Major Works

• Twenty Love Poems and a song of Despair (1924)

• Residencia en la tierra (1925–1931)

• 1950 Cando General, catalog of the history, geography, and flora and fauna of South America, accompanied by Neruda's observations and experiences.

• Greek composer Mikis Theordorakis set to music the Canto general.

• Jazz vocalist Luciana Souza released an album called "Neruda" (2004) featuring 10 of Neruda's poems

• Odas elementales. 1954

Diplomatic work

• Out of financial desperation, he took an honorary consulship in Rangoon. Rangoon was a place he had never heard of before. Later, mired in isolation and loneliness, he worked in Ceylon, Java and Singapore. In 1929 he was the Chilean consul in Ceylon or Sri Lanka.

• After returning to Chile, Neruda was given diplomatic posts in Buenos Aires and then Barcelona. He later succeeded Gabriela Mistral as consul in Madrid.

• After the Spanish Civil War, Neruda was appointed by the Chilean government special consul for Spanish emigrants in Paris

• Neruda's next diplomatic post was as Consul General in Mexico City, where he spent the years 1940 to 1943.

• In 1970, Neruda was nominated as a candidate for the Chilean presidency, but he gave his support to Salvador Allende

• First adviser to Salvador Allende, then Allende's ambassador to France from 1970 to 1973

Gabriel García Márquez, 1982Colombia (1927 Aracataca - 2014 Mexico City)

Major Works

• One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)

• The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975)

• And Love in the Time of Cholera (1985)

• This novel is considered a non-traditional love story as "lovers find love in their 'golden years'—in their seventies.

• He is equally well known for his short stories

• Nobody Writes to the Colonel (a short novel or a long short story), In Evil Hour, and Big Mama's Funeral

No diplomatic work

• However he worked as a journalist from his university years until he became a full-time writer. He write fir newspapers mostly in Colombia, Venezuela and Mexico.

The Latin American BoomHow it was created

• LA became a significant cultural player on the international scene through its Boom of 1960s and 1970s

• It was a coherent literary, cultural and political movement

• The main writers of the Boom are García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa and José Donoso.

What brought the group together?

• Knowing that intellectuals act as a moral conscience for the regions which they both symbolize and help create, Cuban woman Haydée Santa María, the director of the Casa de las Americas in Havana, united LA writers in order to promote and disseminate through them the ideals of the Cuban Revolution (1959). The intellectual capital thus shifted from Paris to Havana.

Further Cubanization of LA literature and culture

• Cuban poet Roberto Fernández Retamar, the next director of Casa de las Americas also, continued to support the unification of LA writers and artists.

• Writers appeared together at conferences, and met with students not only in Cuba but all over Latin America.

• Irene Rostango writes, ¨an outstanding feature of the Boom coterie was its sense of importance as a group of innovators¨ seeking to be recognized as LA writers in LA but also in Europe and US.

The support of the Boom in Europe

• Spanish socialist poet Carlos Barral met the group of LA writers in Cuba and published their work in one place as he owned the well-known publishing house Seix Barral in Barcelona.

• Through Barral LA writers also met an aggressive literary agent, Carmen Balcells, who really made the boom by bringing the LA novels of the 1960s to the US market.

• Balcells was a daughter of small landowners in a small town in Spain.

US reception/reaction

• The Boom writers were greatly supported by the US, but as José Donoso believes, their interest in LA literature was ¨the US camouflaged interest in LA politics.¨

• To counter the impact of Cubas cultural revolution on LA intellectuals, Center for Inter-American Relations was created in 1962.

• The center employed the best translators, such as Gregory Rabassa, prominent critics such as Rodriguez Monegal, who edited the literary journal El MundoNuevo, and it invited influential personalities such as Susan Sontag and John Updike.

Interesting information

• The journal that supported the LA Boom writers, EL Mundo Nuevo, was linked to the British literary journal Encounter which was supported, the New York Times wrote, by CIA.

• While the CIA support can be disputed, the support of Rockefeller brothers was clear. They also endorsed Kennedy´s Aliance for Progress in ¨the struggle for the leftist propaganda.¨

How was the ¨leftist propaganda ¨combatted?

• LA literature was promoted as innovative, but the innovation did not come so much from the content as from the form.

• LA literature was promoted as literature of Magical Relaism where the emphasis was put on the ¨Magical.¨

• Literature after the boom was promoted as literature of human rights (Central America) and feminist literature as that of Isabel Allende and Luisa Valenzuela. Susan Sontag and Hollywood played a particular role in this.

Octavio Paz 1990Mexico (1914-1998 Mexico City)

Major Works

• Influenced by the work of T.S. Eliot

• "Between the Stone and the Flower" (1941, revised in 1976)

• Piedra del sol (1957) (Sunstone)

• El labirinto de la soledad "The Labyrinth of Solitude“ (1945) described his fellow countrymen as instinctive nihilists who hide behind masks of solitude and ceremoniousness

• In his magazines Plural and Vuelta, Paz exposed the volations of human rights in communist regimes, including Castro´s Cuba. This brought him much animosity from sectors of the Latin American left.

Diplomatic Service

• 1945 he entered the Mexican diplomatic service, with his first job in New York City. In 1945.

• He was then sent to Paris.

• In 1952, he went to Tokyo, as chargé ´d´affaires.

• He next was assigned to Geneva, Switzerland.

• In 1959 he was sent again to Paris.

• In 1962 he was named Mexico's ambassador to India.

Mario Vargas Llosa 2010Peru (1936-

Major Works

• Swedish Academy said that the Nobel Prize in Literature was given to Vargas Llosa "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat.“

• He writes prolifically across an array of literary genres, including literary criticism and journalism.

• His novels include comedies, murder mysteries, historical novels, and political thrillers.

• Several of his novels have been adapted as feature films.

Rose to fame in the 1960s

• Vargas Llosa rose to fame in the 1960s with novels such as The Time of the Hero (La ciudad y los perros, literally The City and the Dogs, 1963.

• The Green House (La casa verde, 1965)

• The monumental Conversation in the Cathedral (Conversación en la catedral) (1969)

Later works

• In 1977 published Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (La tía Julia y el escribidor), based in part on his marriage to his first wife who was his aunt (Julia Urquidi). She later wrote a memoir, Lo que Varguitas no dijo (What Little Vargas Didn't Say)

• In 1981 he published The War of the End of the World (La guerra del fin del mundo). This novel was his first attempt at a historical novel. Some critics claim that this is his best work.

• In 2000 he wrote another major work, The Feast of the Goat (La fiesta del chivo), a political thriller.

Political engagement

• In 1987 the attempt by the then president of Peru, Alan García, to nationalise the banking industry was vehemently rejected by Vargas Llosa, who saw this project as a strategy to accumulate power and place the media and businesses in government hands.

• With the support of large sectors of the population, Vargas Llosaorganised protest marches which catapulted him into the political arena. His Movimiento Libertad, which opposed Alan García, evolved into the Frente Democrático, three years later.

• As the leader of this party he ran in the presidential elections in 1990. However, he lost in the second round to the engineer Alberto Fujimori, who then shut down congress and established a despotic and corrupt dictatorship for which he is currently serving a sentence.

• Memories of these years can be found in his book of memoirs A Fish in the Water (1993).

Magical Realism

• Four years ago, this writer of Magical Realism wrote a book that said the world was going to hell. Journalists were sleaze-mongers and politicians hopeless. Civilization had collapsed into spectacle.

Other Important LA Writers

• Jorge Luis Borges, who was nominated for the Nobel Prize a few times