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Blanca Varela
Blanca Leonor Varela Gonzales was considered one of the most important poets of Latin American literature.
Her mother was a composer who authored many famous creole waltzes. She studied at the National University of San Marcos where she met other future writers such as Sebastian Salazar Bondy, Javier Sologuren, Jorge Eduardo Eielson, and her future husband, the sculptor Fernando de Szyszlo with whom she has two children. In 1949 they travelled to Paris where she met Octavio Paz, a key figure in her life, who introduced her to the artists and intellectuals there, such as Andre Breton, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Henri Michaux, Alberto Giacometti and Fernand Leger, among others; and also other Latin American authors who lived in France at that time, for example Carlos Martinez Rivas. Paz persuaded her to publish her poetry, and in the preface to the first edition of her debut book Ese puerto existe (1959) he wrote: "At that time we all used to sing. And among those songs you could hear a lonesome song of one Peruvian girl: Blanca Varela. The most secret, timid and natural of them all." Later Varela lived in Firenze and Washington. In 1962 she returned to Lima and since then travels mainly to USA, Spain and France.
Related websites
Octavio Paz
Ternera acosada por tabanos
Info, photo and poetry in English
Info and poetry, in Spanish
10. 5. 2007, Lorca's Granada Prize, with a photo
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Blanca Varela
