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Luisa Valenzuela
Luisa Valenzuela is a post-'Boom' novelist and short story writer. Her writing is characterized by an experimental, avant-garde style which questions hierarchical social structures from a feminist perspective.Sharon Magnarelli, Reflections/Refractions, Reading Luisa Valenzuela . She is best known for her work written in response to the dictatorship of the 1970s in Argentina. Works such as Como en la guerra (1977), Cambio de armas (1982) and Cola de lagartija (1983) combine a powerful critique of dictatorship with an examination of patriarchal forms of social organization and the power structures which inhere in human sexuality and gender relationships.Juana Maria Cordones-Cook, Poetica de la transgresion en la novelistica de Luisa Valenzuela .
Luisa Valenzuela was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on November 26, 1938, to Pablo Franciso Valenzuela, a physician, and to writer Luisa Mercedes Levinson. At her mother's house various writers gathered such as Adolfo Bioy Casares, Jorge Luis Borges and Ernesto Sabato. Though she felt an interest in natural sciences from an early age, at 17 she began publishing in several newspapers, such as Atlantida, El Hogar and Esto Es, and worked for Radio Belgrano, as well. At 20, just barely married to Theodore Marjak, a French merchant marine, she moved to Paris where she worked for Radio Television Francaise, and met members of both the nouveau roman literary movement and Tel Quel. She published her first fiction work entitled Clara (Hay que sonreir), whose main character would give its name to the title of the book of both English and french translations. In 1958, Luisa Valenzuela gave birth to her daughter Anna-Luisa. In 1961 she moved back to Argentina, where she worked as a journalist for La Nacion and Crisis magazine. In 1965 she got divorced. During 1967 and 1968 she traveled throughout Bolivia, Peru and Brazil working for La Nacion.
Luis Valenzuela was a Resident Writer at the Center for Interamerican Relations at New York and Columbia University, where she taught writing workshops and seminars for ten years. She was a member of the New York Institute for the Humanities, at the Fund for Free Expression and member of the Freedom to Write Committee of the PEN American Center. In 1983 she was awarded the Guggenheim Scholarship. In 1989 she returned to Buenos Aires, where she finished her fiction works National Reality from Bed (Realidad nacional desde la cama), conceived initially as a play but finished as a novel and Black novel with Argentines (Novela negra con argentinos) that originally was meant to bear the title of The Motive (El motivo).
Related websites
Official site
Short Biography
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