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Latin America’s First Female Nobel Laureate
Gabriela Mistral’s Poetic Retelling of “Snow White”
Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, who was best-known by her literary pseudonym, Gabriela Mistral, was a Chilean educator, diplomat and writer. She was born in 1889 in Vicuña, Chile, a village nestled in the Andes, north of Santiago.
Mistral’s first poems were published in 1904 in El Coquimbo and La Voz del Elqui, two local newspapers. It was around those years that she published Sonetos de la muerte (Death Sonnets), a collection of love poems in memory of the dead, which made her known throughout Latin America. In 1922 she wrote her first great collection of poems, Desolación (Desolation), and later in 1924 appeared Ternura (Tenderness), a volume of poetry dominated by the theme of childhood.
She lived in Italy and France, were she worked for the League for Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations, attending conferences of women and educators throughout Europe. Mistral was involved in the shaping of Mexico’s and Chile’s education systems. She also worked as a diplomatic consul from 1932 until her death, in cities like Naples, Madrid, Lisbon, and New York.
Finally in 1945 she was awarded the Nobel Prize of Literature, making her the first Latin American author to receive this award.
