Five Latin American Women Writers Worth Knowing

Say "Latin American literature" and a familiar set of names arrives: García Márquez, Cortázar, Vargas Llosa, Borges. The Boom of the 1960s was a genuine literary event, and it was also very good at deciding who counted.

Around it, before it and after it, women were writing — and in at least one case had already won the region's first Nobel Prize before most of the Boom novelists had published a book. Five worth starting with.

Gabriela Mistral (Chile, 1889–1957)

A rural schoolteacher who became a poet, a diplomat, and in 1945 the first Latin American writer of any gender to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. That is not a footnote; it is the headline. Her poetry is plain-spoken and preoccupied with grief, children and the land, and she is still read across the Spanish-speaking world in classrooms where the Boom novelists are not.

Teresa de la Parra (Venezuela, 1889–1936)

Born in Paris, raised on a plantation near Caracas, and the author of Ifigenia (1924) — a novel written as the diary of a young woman who returns to Caracas, discovers that her intelligence has no use in the life available to her, and submits to a marriage she does not want.

Venezuelan society of the time was not delighted. The book was read as an attack on the values of her own class, which is more or less what it is. Her later Las memorias de Mamá Blanca (1929) is gentler and just as good. She died of tuberculosis at forty-seven, having written very little and enough.

Victoria Ocampo (Argentina, 1890–1979)

Less a novelist than a force. She founded and funded Sur, the magazine that for decades was the centre of literary life in Argentina and a bridge between Latin America and Europe. She published Borges. She published Woolf in translation. A great deal of what the continent read, it read because Ocampo decided to print it.

Rosario Castellanos (Mexico, 1925–1974)

Poet, novelist, essayist and diplomat, and one of the earliest Mexican writers to put the treatment of indigenous communities and the position of women at the centre of her work rather than at the edges. Her essays in particular have aged extremely well — sharp, funny, and unwilling to let anyone off lightly.

Isabel Allende (Chile, born 1942)

The most widely read of the five by some distance. The House of the Spirits (1982) began as a letter to her dying grandfather and became one of the best-selling novels ever written in Spanish. Critics have spent forty years arguing about whether she is a serious writer or a popular one, which is usually a sign that someone is selling a great many books and unsettling people by doing it.

Where to start

If you are Venezuelan, start with Teresa de la Parra — she is writing about a Caracas that is both gone and recognisable. If you want poetry, Mistral. If you want a novel to disappear into for a week, Allende. The Boom is worth reading. It was simply never the whole story.