Guatemalan writer (1929–2018)
Margarita Carrera Molina (16 September 1929 – 31 March 2018) was a Guatemalan philosopher, professor and writer. She was a member of the Academia Guatemalteca de la Lengua and the 1996 laureate of the Miguel Ángel Asturias National Prize in Literature.
Early life.
Margarita Carrera Molina was born 16 September 1929 in Guatemala City to Frenchman Antonio Carrera Martello and Josefina Molina Llardén. Her father committed suicide when she was a child and she had to work to help support her family, going to night school to learn. She was the first female graduate in Literature from Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala in 1957.
Career.
From 1957 she was employed as a university professor at her alma mater, as well as Rafael Landívar University and Universidad del Valle de Guatemala. She was a lecturer at the Autonomous University of Madrid and served as guest writer on numerous international congresses held in Costa Rica, France, Germany, France, Germany, Mexico, Panama, Puerto Rico, Spain, Sweden, the US and Venezuela. She was the first woman to ever become a member of the Academia Guatemalteca de la Lengua in 1967.
Carrera joined the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, in Iowa City, IA in 1982. From 1993 she worked as a columnist for "Prensa Libre" of Guatemala and published in many other newspapers, including "Diario de Centro America", "La Hora", and "El Imparcial". She wrote two columns at "Prensa Libre" weekly, in addition to having published twenty books. In 1996, she was awarded the Miguel Ángel Asturias National Prize in Literature.
In an interview in her 70s, Carrera said that she often wrote about men she found interesting and whom she studied to help her understand the man she never knew, her father. Among those she studied and wrote about were Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno. After his death, she read about Juan José Gerardi Conedera and ended up writing a novel about his life: "En la mirilla del jaguar: biografía novelada de Monseñor Gerardi", published in 2002. She was awarded the Monseñor Gerardi Conedera Order in 2004.
Personal life and death.
Carrera was married for seven years and divorced. She had two children. Carrera died in Guatemala on 31 March 2018 at the age of 88.
References.
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