Alejandra Pizarnik

Fiona Mackintosh (University of Edinburgh); Karl Posso (University of Manchester)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 5.1.1: Hispanic Writing and Culture of South America.
Vol. editors: Kate Averis (University of Western Australia), Ben Bollig (University of Oxford), Ceire Broderick (University College Cork), Nuala Finnegan (University College Cork), Anna Forné (Gothenburg University), Cara Levey (University College Cork), Carolina Orloff (Independent Scholar - Europe), Lori Oxford (Western Carolina University), Ailsa Peate (University of Westminster)

Dates

Born 29 Apr 1936
Died 25 Sep 1972
Activity 1955-1972

Places

Born in Argentina
Active in Argentina

Activities

Primary

Poet

Resources

Pizarnik's Works

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In recent years Pizarnik has come to be widely acknowledged as a key figure within Argentinian literature. Born Flora Alejandra Pizarnik in 1936 in a Jewish immigrant district of Buenos Aires, Pizarnik rapidly evolved a distinctive poetic persona, the so-called “personaje alejandrino” [Alejandra character] (

Correspondencia Pizarnik

, p. 53). This poetic self fed off her intense and eclectic reading which spanned Golden Age Spanish poetry,

poètes maudits

such as Baudelaire and Rimbaud, surrealism, and the tortured worlds of Artaud and Kafka. The result was an accentuation of her latent feelings of estrangement, both from her immediate social environment and ultimately from language itself. In her short lifetime (ended by an overdose in 1972) she published eight collections of poetry,…

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3319 words

Citation: Mackintosh, Fiona, Karl Posso. "Alejandra Pizarnik". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 11 March 2008 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=11992, accessed 26 April 2024.]

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