Cristina Peri Rossi

Cristina Peri Rossi (born November 12, 1941, Montevideo, Uruguay) is a Uruguayan short-story writer, novelist, and poet who is considered one of the leading Latin American writers to have published in the period after the “boom of the Latin American novel” (when Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar, and others came to prominence in the 1960s). She is also one of a group of Latin American women writers—such as Nélida Piñón, Isabel Allende, Rosario Ferré, and Elena Poniatowska—who gained fame at the end of the 20th century. Peri Rossi’s fiction is often about women, and her work is broadly ironic, witty, and metaphysical.

Peri Rossi’s great-grandparents on both sides were Italian immigrants, but, when she left Uruguay in 1972 to escape political repression by the military government, she went to Spain, where she worked as a journalist in Barcelona, writing for Diario 16, El Periódico, and Agencia Efe.

Peri Rossi’s first book, Viviendo (“Living”), was published in 1963, but it had been written much earlier. It is a collection of narratives with female protagonists. She won several literary prizes early in her career for her poetry and short stories. Her award-winning Los museos abandonados (1969; “Abandoned Museums”) is a series of short stories, but some consider it to be a brief novel. (One of the features of her work is disregard for genre boundaries and conventions.) Peri Rossi’s Diáspora (1976; “Diaspora”) is a book of poetry.

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Peri Rossi explored themes of exile in the poems of Descripción de un naufragio (1975; “Description of a Shipwreck”) and in the short-story collection Una pasión prohibida (1986; A Forbidden Passion). La tarde del dinosaurio (1976; “The Afternoon of the Dinosaur”) is a volume of stories with a prologue by Cortázar. Witty El museo de los esfuerzos inútiles (1983; The Museum of Useless Efforts) is another book of stories about estrangement. Her novels included La nave de los locos (1984; The Ship of Fools), La última noche de Dostoievski (1992; Dostoevsky’s Last Night), Desastres íntimos (1997; Intimate Disasters), and El amor es una droga dura (1999; “Love Is a Strong Drug”).

Solitario de amor (1988; Solitaire of Love) explores an obsessive sexual relationship; Fantasías eróticas (1991; “Erotic Fantasies”) also brings to the fore the theme of obsessive sex. In one story of Los museos abandonados, a couple abandon themselves to erotic play in the midst of a museum in ruins. Peri Rossi’s occasional vaguely pornographic story has a touch of the allegorical: love against death and destruction.

Peri Rossi’s other works included the poetry collection Estrategias del deseo (2004: “Strategies of Desire”). In 2021 she received the Cervantes Prize, the most prestigious award given for Spanish-language literature.