Juan Gelman

Juan Gelman was born on May 3, 1930, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to Jewish immigrants from Ukraine. He developed an interest in poetry at a very young age, influenced by his brother Boris, who read to him several poems in Russian. He also learned to read when he was three years old, and spent much of his childhood reading and playing soccer. He was a member of several notable literary groups and later became an important journalist. He also worked as a translator at the United Nations. He was always an ardent political activist. In 1975 he became involved with the Montoneros, a left-wing Peronist group that used violence in its efforts to overthrow the military government. After the 1976 Argentine coup, he was forced into exile from Argentina. He lived in Europe until 1988, then in United States and later in Mexico, with his wife, Argentine psychologist Mara La Madrid. In 1976, his son Marcelo and his pregnant daughter-in-law, Maria Claudia, aged 20 and 19, were kidnapped from their home. They became two of the 30,000 desaparecidos, the people who were forcibly "vanished" without a trace during the reign of the military junta. In 1990 Gelman was led to identify his son's remains (he had been executed and buried in a barrel filled with sand and cement), and years later, in 2000, he was able to trace his granddaughter, born in a backdoor hospital before Maria Claudia's murder and given to a pro-government family in Uruguay. The remains of Maria Claudia have not yet been recovered. During his long exile, Gelman published more than twenty books of poetry, which reflect his own painful experiences with the politics of Argentina, as well as his Jewish heritage, the nature of poetry itself, and his celebration of life. He received many awards for his poetry, including the Argentine National Poetry Prize in 1997, and the Cervantes Prize, the most important prize for Spanish-language writers, in 2007. He also had a long and brilliant career as journalist,