Latin America's Women Writers Ride Wave Of Acclaim

Mexico City, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 26th Nov, 2021 ) :From Uruguay to Mexico, Argentina to Ecuador, women writers from across Latin America are enjoying growing acclaim after years of marginalization by an industry they say has long favored male authors.

They reject the label of a new "Latin American boom" like the one that thrust male writers such as Peru's Mario Vargas Llosa and Colombia's Gabriel Garcia Marquez to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s.

Instead, they see their success as a welcome break from the prejudice that sidelined many of their predecessors during the 20th century.

This weekend, hundreds of writers, editors and literary agents are expected to gather in Mexico's second city for the Guadalajara International Book Fair, considered one of the world's most important.

Uruguayan writer Fernanda Trias will receive the Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz Prize for her novel "Mugre Rosa" (Filthy Rose).

The 20th-century Latin American boom elevated figures such as Garcia Marquez and Vargas Llosa, but also "made the great women writers of that time invisible," Trias, 45, told AFP.

But things are changing.

Her compatriot Cristina Peri Rossi won this year's Cervantes Prize, considered the most prestigious award in Spanish-language literature.

Rather than a boom, Karina Pacheco of Peru prefers to speak of a "wonderful outpouring of women's voices.

" "They have been there, contained by a dam, by the prejudice that a woman will not write as well as a man," said Pacheco, 52, the author of "El ano del viento" (The Year of the Wind).

- 'Intimate stories' - Mexico's Guadalupe Nettel, winner of the 2014 Herralde Spanish literary prize for her novel "Despues del invierno" (After the Winter), sees underlying shifts in readers' tastes.

Writers and readers alike are now inclined "much more towards subjectivities, minorities, the most intimate stories," she said.

"And in that, women have always been the great narrators of everyday life, of the inner life," said the 48-year-old.

Common themes explored by Latin American women writers include violence, fear and victimhood, as well as terror, supernatural or otherwise, said Maria Fernanda Ampuero, the Ecuadoran author of "Pelea de Gallos" (Cockfight).

Shunning marriage or having children is another shared thread, since "we were on the streets more, more exposed... (to) the dangers of being a woman," added Ampuero, 45.

Trias sees common themes of de-romanticizing motherhood and "the different types of violence suffered by women's bodies.""Women's issues are issues of humanity," she said.