Silvina Ocampo

Silvina Ocampo (Buenos Aires, 1903 – Buenos Aires, 1993) was an Argentine short story writer and poet who also worked as a painter early in her life. She wrote in Spanish, but her imagination was shaped by a childhood in which French and English came before Spanish. She is regarded as one of the most important Argentine writers of the twentieth century, and her work sits comfortably alongside the fantastic tradition in Latin America.

Born into a wealthy Buenos Aires family, she was the youngest of six sisters. Her education at home was unusually broad, with French and English governesses and teachers of Spanish and Italian. Between 1920 and her return to Argentina she studied painting and drawing in Paris, where she met Fernand Léger and Giorgio de Chirico. Back home she exhibited her work and joined the founding group of the magazine Sur, edited by her sister Victoria, though she had little say in its editorial decisions.

She met Adolfo Bioy Casares in 1932 and married him in 1940. The marriage was difficult, since Bioy openly had other lovers, and critics still debate whether Ocampo should be read as a victim or as a woman with a full emotional life of her own. In 1954 the couple raised Marta, Bioy's daughter from another relationship, as their own. Her first collection of stories, Viaje olvidado, appeared in 1937 and was received with reservations at first, though it later came to be seen as fundamental. She also wrote poetry from 1942 onward and alternated the two genres for decades.

Her fiction is known for its boundless imagination and its close attention to language. Many of her stories start from the everyday and tip it into the uncanny, often through a voice that seems childlike and names the strange with surprise or indifference. Childhood, memory, domestic cruelty and the strangeness of ordinary life run through her work. Collections such as La furia and Los días de la noche helped define her mature style.

In her final years Alzheimer's disease gradually took her away from writing, and she died in Buenos Aires in 1993. Posthumous publications, including the novel La promesa and the collection Las repeticiones, have extended her readership. Her legacy lies in having brought the fantastic into the daily life of Argentine middle-class households, and her reputation has grown steadily since her books were reissued.