Gabriela Mistral

Gabriela Mistral was born Lucila Godoy Alcayaga in 1889 in Vicuña, in northern Chile, and grew up in the Andean village of Montegrande, where her elder sister taught her at the local school. Her father, also a schoolteacher, left the family when she was three, and poverty marked her childhood. At fifteen she was supporting herself and her mother as a teacher’s aide, and she began publishing poems in local newspapers under various names.

She won Chile’s national Juegos Florales poetry contest with her “Sonnets of Death”, and thereafter wrote as Gabriela Mistral, a name usually traced to her admiration for Gabriele D’Annunzio and Frédéric Mistral. Her first book, Desolación (1922), published in New York, gathered poems of love, loss, faith, nature and motherhood that made her reputation across the Spanish-speaking world. Ternura (1924) collected lullabies and rounds for children, while Tala (1938), published in Buenos Aires with the help of Victoria Ocampo, broadened her range towards the landscapes and peoples of the Americas. Her work, spare and intensely felt, stood apart from the ornate modernismo of her predecessors. Alongside it she wrote some 800 essays and articles, and from 1932 until her death served as a Chilean consul in cities from Naples, Madrid and Lisbon to Petrópolis and Los Angeles.

In 1943 her beloved nephew Juan Miguel took his own life; the grief runs through her last collection, Lagar (1954). Two years after his death, in 1945, she became the first Latin American writer to receive the Nobel Prize. She spent her last years in the United States and died in Hempstead, New York, in 1957, with her companion Doris Dana at her side. Her portrait appears on Chile’s 5,000-peso note.