Gabriela Mistral

Chilean poet and feminist, who combined writing with a career as an educator, cultural minister, and diplomat; her diplomatic assignments included posts in Madrid, Lisbon, Genoa, and Nice.

A love affair was ended by the suicide of her lover and because of this tragedy, she never married, and a haunting, wistful strain of thwarted maternal tenderness informs her work.

Mistral’s extraordinarily passionate verse, which is frequently coloured by figures and words peculiarly her own, is marked by warmth of feeling and emotional power.

She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1945.

She died from pancreatic cancer on 10 January 1957, aged 67, in Hempstead, New York.