Gabriela Mistral

Gabriela Mistral was the pen name of Lucila de María del Perpetuo Socorro Godoy Alcayaga, a Chilean poet, educator, and diplomat born in Vicuña in the Elqui Valley in 1889 and died in Hempstead, New York, in 1957. She grew up in the small village of Montegrande, where her older half-sister was the schoolteacher, and she began writing verse as a teenager while supporting herself as a rural schoolmistress.

Her early life was shadowed by the suicide of a young railway worker she had loved, an event that fed the grief and tenderness of her first major poems. Writing under the pseudonym Gabriela Mistral, taken from Gabriele D'Annunzio and Frédéric Mistral, she won the 1914 Juegos Florales prize in Santiago with her Sonetos de la muerte. Her first collection, Desolación, appeared in New York in 1922.

That same year the Mexican education minister José Vasconcelos invited her to Mexico to help reform the rural school system, beginning a long career as a roving cultural diplomat. She held Chilean consular posts in Madrid, Lisbon, Nice, Petrópolis, Los Angeles, and elsewhere, and represented her country at the League of Nations and the United Nations. Later collections include Ternura, Tala, and Lagar, ranging across motherhood, indigenous America, exile, and the natural world.

In 1945 the Swedish Academy awarded her the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first such honor for a Latin American writer and still the only one for a Latin American woman. She continued to write and teach until her death from cancer at the age of sixty-seven, and her face has appeared on Chilean banknotes.

The name Gabriela is the Spanish feminine form of Gabriel, from the Hebrew Gavri'el, traditionally interpreted as God is my strength. The archangel Gabriel, messenger of the Annunciation, carried the masculine form throughout the Christian world. She wore the feminine as the chosen name of Latin America's voice of compassion.