Mario Benedetti (born September 14, 1920) is an Uruguayan journalist, novelist, and poet.
Benedetti was born in Paso de los Toros, Tacuarembó;, Uruguay. He is not well known in the English-speaking world, but in the Spanish-speaking world he is considered one of Latin America's most important living writers. In 1946 he married Luz López Alegre.
From 1973 to 1985, when a military dictatorship ruled Uruguay, Benedetti lived in exile in Buenos Aires, Lima, Havana, and Spain. He currently divides his time between Montevideo and Madrid. He has been granted Honoris Causa doctorates by the Universidad de la República, Uruguay, and the Universidad de Alicante, Spain. On June 7 2005 he was named as the recipient of the Premio Menéndez Pelayo.
Uruguayan novelist and short-story writer, a master in fusing fantasy and realism. Onetti was awarded Uruguay's national literature prize in 1963 and Spain's prestigious Cervantes Prize in 1980. In La vida breve (1950) Onetti created the fictional port town of Santa María, which also is the setting of his later works. Onetti wrote with a mixture of comedy and sadness about the loneliness of life, absurd values, the futility of religion, and the breakdown of modern town life. Although the tone was often pessimistic, his stories were rich in imagination.
Juan Carlos Onetti was born in Montevideo of Uruguayan, Brazilian, and possibly Irish background. He never completed his secondary education and spent his first twenty years in his native Uruguay, working in odd jobs. He then moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he worked as a journalist and began publishing short stories in the early 1930s. From 1946 to 1955 Onetti edited the Vea y Lea, in Buenos Aires.
Joaquín Torres-García was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1874. His family moved to Europe when he was a teenager. It would be forty-three years before he returned to Uruguay and changed the direction of Latin American art. He first studied art in Spain, where he also taught for the first time. In 1926, Torres-García met and befriended a number of avant-garde artists in France. This resulted in his experimentation with many modern artistic theories and movements. He eventually began to diverge from his peers in his feeling that industry was the enemy of creativity, and that art should be permanent and unchanging, not innovative and progressive.
When Torres-García developed his own theory of art, which he called Universalismo constructivo (Universal Constructivism), his desire was to found a truly Latin American art. He believed that art should incorporate human experience, and that geometry was the most effective and universal means to represent that experience. Focusing on what he called "spiritual geometry" rather than strictly mathematic geometry, Torres-García created a system of abstraction that incorporated symbols filled with personal and national history and meaning. He found that pre-Hispanic culture was, for him, rich in "spiritual geometry...which does not lie in knowing the physical, but the essential of everything."
When he finally returned to Uruguay in 1934, he was determined to create a school to advance Universal Constructivism. The result was El Taller Torres-García(the Torres-García studio), part of the School of the South, where artists worked collectively on murals, architecture, sculpture, and crafts, often in conjunction with writers, musicians, and performers.
Many of Torres-García's symbols and words are autobiographical in origin, and the Gallery's Abstract Art in Five Tones and Complementariesis typical of his style. The saw at the upper left refers to human production in general, and carpentry in particular; both his father and grandfather were carpenters. The stylized primitive pot on the right is one of his most commonly employed symbols. Often grouped with a hammer or compass, it refers to culture and labor. The hourglass form at the lower left is a sign for the intellect. The words in the painting announce his origins and priorities: MONTEVIDEO is his birthplace; ARTE ABSTRACTE the style in which he paints; SIGLO XX is the twentieth century; and his initials and the date of the work are also incorporated as design elements.
Uruguayan essayist, journalist and historian. Galeano's best-known works include Memoria del fuego (1982-1986, Memory of Fire) and Las venas abiertas de América Latina (1971, The Open Veins of Latin America), which have been translated into some 20 languages. Galeano defies easy categorization as an author. His works transcend orthodox genres, and combine documentary, fiction, journalism, political analysis, and history. The author himself has denied that he is a historian: "I'm a writer obsessed with remembering, with remembering the past of America above all and above all that of Latin America, intimate land condemned to amnesia."
Eduardo Galeano was born in Montevideo into a middle-class Catholic family of Welsh, German, Spanish and Italian ancestry. He was educated in Uruguay until the age of 16. "I never learned in school," he once said. "I didn't like it."
In adolescence Galeano worked in odd jobs - he was a factory worker, a bill collector, a sign painter, a messenger, a typist, and a bank teller. At the age of 14 Galeano sold his first political cartoon to El Sol, the Socialist Party weekly. Galeano's pseudonym was Gius. His first article was published in 1954.
