Cristina Peri Rossi

Cristina Peri Rossi is a Uruguayan-Spanish novelist and poet born in 1941 in Montevideo. She went into exile in Spain in 1972 to escape political persecution under Uruguay's military dictatorship, eventually becoming a Spanish citizen. She has lived in Barcelona for most of the past fifty years, and her work engages ceaselessly with the experience of exile, displacement, and political repression. Peri Rossi is the author of an extensive body of work including short story collections such as El libro de mis primos (1969), novels including La nave de los locos (The Ship of Fools, 1984), and many volumes of poetry. Her fiction is known for its political allegory, its surrealist imagery, and its frank treatment of female sexuality and desire. She received the Premio Cervantes in 2021 — awarded in recognition not only of her literary achievement but of her political courage and her role as a witness to the Latin American experience of dictatorship and exile. The recognition came after decades in which Peri Rossi had been a celebrated but somewhat marginalized figure. Peri Rossi is one of the most significant women writers in Spanish-language literature and a central figure in the literature of exile.