Gabriela mistral

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1945/mistral-bio.html
http://www.distinguishedwomen.com/biographies/mistral.html


Gabriela Mistral Life

 born in Vicuña, Chile1889. died on January 10, 1957. birth name was Lucila Godoy Alcayaga


she began to write poetry as a village schoolteacher after a passionate romance with a railway employee who committed suicide. Atage sixteen (1905) she moved to La Cantera to take a job and fell in love with a young railway worker. The relationhip didn't last and two years later the young man committed suicide. The only itemfound in his posession was a postcard from Mistral. This affected her deeply and she wrote Sonetas de la Muerte (Sonnets of Death) to express her feelings.

In 1922 Mistral accepted the invitation ofJose Vasconcelos, the Mexican minister of education, to start educational programs for the poor in Mexico. She introduced mobile libraries to rural areas to make access to literature easier foreveryone. Later, she edited a book of poetry and prose entitled Readings for Women. In addition, she traveled to other countries to study their methods of teaching. In 1923, Mistral was awarded the title"Teacher of the Nation" by her own government.


the first Latin American woman to win a Nobel Prize in Literature (1945)


Her Workhttp://home.wlu.edu/~barnettj/Holding/99/cstovall/newmistral.htm


Mistral’s attention to the theme of love, which resembles the same theme in the love poems of Neruda, appears in “Sonetos de la muerte” in 1914, a collection of love poems remembering the deadthat spread her fame throughout Latin America.  In 1922, Mistral published her first notable collection of poems, Desolación, including “Dolor,” detailing the suicide of her former lover and plainlystating the theme of suffering which appears consistently in her work.  Another work entitled Ternura (1924) reflects the repercussions of her lover’s death and her failure to marry by incorporating...