Alejandra Pizarnik

Flora Alejandra Pizarnik was born on April 29, 1936, in Avellaneda, Buenos Aires, the daughter of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants. She studied philosophy and literature at the University of Buenos Aires before living in Paris from 1960 to 1964, working for the journal Cuadernos and befriending Julio Cortázar and Octavio Paz.

Paz wrote the preface to her breakthrough collection Árbol de Diana (Diana's Tree, 1962). Pizarnik's poetry is characterized by a razor-sharp, aphoristic minimalism that cuts into existential anguish with surgical beauty. In Extracción de la piedra de locura (1968) and El infierno musical (1971), she turned language against silence until taking her own life at age thirty-six, her diary and poems now revered across global literature.