Gonzalo Rojas’ 106th Birthday – Today’s Doodle celebrates the 106th birthday of Gonzalo Rojas, a Chilean poet, diplomat, and teacher who won the Chilean National Prize for Literature in 1992. He wrote and published more than 40 collections of poetry throughout his career, often focusing on melodic words that sound pleasing to the ear.
Rojas was born in Lebu, Chile on this day in 1916. He attended boarding school on scholarship and eventually studied law and literature at the University of Chile in Santiago. While working on his first poetry volume, Rojas also taught literacy to miners in the Atacama desert. During this time, he also founded a literary journal called Antárctica and served as its editor.
The publication of his first collection, La miseria del hombre (The Misery of Man), in 1948, won him international recognition as a poet. Rojas published countless more collections like Contra la muerte (Against Death, 1964), Oscuro (Darkness, 1977), and Del relámpago (Of Lightning, 1981) throughout his seven-decade career.
He also worked as a lecturer and administrator at the University of Concepción, organizing seminars and conferences during the height of Latin American literature in the 1960s. In the early 1970s, Rojas served as a diplomatic ambassador until political tensions led to his exile. From there, he traveled to universities in Germany, Spain, the United States and more to teach Spanish literature.
A Guggenheim scholarship allowed Rojas to return to Chile in 1979. He settled in the city of Chillán, where he continued publishing celebrated works of poetry. He went on to win the Chilean National Prize for Literature (Chile’s highest national award for writers), the Miguel de Cervantes Prize of Spain, the Octavio Paz Prize of Mexico and the José Hernandez Prize of Argentina in his later years.
You can find more about Gonzalo Rojas’ 106th Birthday on the official Google Doodle Page
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