Born: April 29, 1936; Death: September 25, 1972

alejandra@ggbb.org

Alejandra Pizarnik was born in Buenos Aires on April 29, 1936, into a family of Eastern European immigrants to Argentina. She studied philosophy and letters at the University of Buenos Aires and, later, pursued an interest in painting under the tutelage of Juan Batlle Planas. Between 1960 and 1964 Pizarnik lived in Paris where she worked for the journal Cuardernos and a few French publishers, contributed poetry and criticism to several French and SPanish-language periodicals, translated Antonin Artaud, Henri Michaux, Aimé Cesairé, and Yves Bonnefoy, and studied the history of religion and contemporary French literature at the Sorbonne. Following her return to Buenos Aires Pizarnik published three of her many volumes, Works and Nights, Extraction of the Stone of Folly, and The Musical Hell, as well as the prose work The Bloody Countess. In 1969 she was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, and in 1971 a Fulbright scholarship. On September 25, 1972, while on weekend leave from the psychiatric clinic where she was interned, Pizarnik died of a self-induced overdose of seconal.

Source: This biography was taken from the book Alejandra Pizarnik: A Profile, by Alejandra Pizarnik, Edited with an Introduction by Frank Graziano, Translated by Maria Rosa Fort and Frank Graziano, and with Additional Translations by Suzanne Jill Levine. All information is copyright 1987 by Lodbridge-Rhodes, Inc. and is reproduced here for free, non-profit, and educational purposes only.