With today being the last day of Hispanic Heritage Month, I wanted to
take a moment to acknowledge some of the prominent Hispanic writers in
the fantasy genre who have helped to pave new roads in our genre and
open up more opportunities, perhaps, for writers like me. I made these posts two years ago on the writers' forum I participate on, Fantasy-writers.org, and I thought it would be nice to share them here. These features are just an image (when available) of the author and a bit about them from their Wikipedia page as well as some assistance from my friend, Nyki Blatchley, whose blog can be found by clicking his name.
Isabel Allende
A Chilean American writer whose works sometimes contain aspects of
the "magic realist" tradition, and is famous for novels such as The
House of the Spirits (La casa de los espíritus, 1982) and City of the
Beasts (La ciudad de las bestias, 2002), which have been commercially
successful. Allende has been called "the world's most widely read
Spanish-language author". In 2004, Allende was inducted into the
American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2010, she received Chile's National Literature Prize.
Rudolfo Anaya
Rudolfo Anaya is a Mexican-American author. Best known for
his 1972 novel Bless Me, Ultima, Anaya is considered one of the founders
of the canon of contemporary Chicano literature.Anaya’s use of Spanish,
mystical depiction of the New Mexican landscape, use of cultural motifs
such as La Llorona, and recounting of curandera folkways
such as the gathering of medicinal herbs, gives readers a sense of the
influence of indigenous cultural ways that are both authentic and
distinct from the mainstream.
Leslie Marmon Silko
Leslie Marmon Silko is a Native American writer of the Laguna Pueblo
tribe, and one of the key figures in the First Wave of what literary
critic Kenneth Lincoln has called the Native American Renaissance.Silko
has noted herself as being 1/4 Laguna Pueblo (a Keres speaking tribe),
also identifying as Anglo American and Mexican American. One of her more successful books is the collection of poetry, short stories and photographs, Storyteller.
Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges was an Argentine
short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires.
His work embraces the "character of unreality in all literature". His
most famous books, Ficciones (1944) and The Aleph (1949), are
compilations of short stories interconnected by common themes such as
dreams, labyrinths, libraries, mirrors, animals, fictional writers,
philosophy, religion and God. His works have contributed to
philosophical literature and also to both the fantasy and magical realism genres.
Laura Esquivel
Laura Esquivel began writing while working as a kindergarten teacher.
She wrote plays for her students and wrote children's television
programs during the 1970s and 1980s. Her first novel, Like Water for Chocolate, became internationally beloved and was made into an award-winning film. Her other titles include The Law of Love and Between the Fires.
Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel García Márquez started as a journalist, and has written many
acclaimed non-fiction works and short stories, but is best known for his
novels, such as One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and Love in the
Time of Cholera (1985). His works have achieved significant critical
acclaim and widespread commercial success, most notably for popularizing
a literary style labeled as magic realism, which uses magical elements
and events in otherwise ordinary and realistic situations. Some of his
works are set in a fictional village called Macondo (the town mainly
inspired by his birthplace Aracataca), and most of them express the
theme of solitude.
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