Valeria Luiselli
Valeria Luiselli
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Full Name and Common Aliases
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Valeria Luiselli is the full name of this Mexican-Italian writer.
Birth and Death Dates
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Born on March 16, 1983, in Mexico City, Mexico. Still active today.
Nationality and Profession(s)
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Mexican-Italian author by nationality, Valeria Luiselli works as a novelist, essayist, and translator.
Early Life and Background
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Growing up in Mexico City, Luiselli developed an interest in writing from an early age. Her parents, both intellectuals themselves, encouraged her to explore literature and languages. She spent part of her childhood between Mexico and Italy, which exposed her to multiple cultures and languages.
Luiselli began writing stories and poetry as a teenager and went on to study at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Her undergraduate degree was in comparative literature with a focus on Latin American and European literature.
Major Accomplishments
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Valeria Luiselli's literary career took off after she won the prestigious Alfaguara Prize for her first novel, Faces in the Crowd, in 2014. This recognition marked the beginning of her success as an author.
The following year, she published Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions, a non-fiction work about the experience of migrant children crossing into the United States alone. This essay has been widely praised for its insight into the complexities of migration policies and their human impact.
In 2018, Luiselli released her novel Lost Children Archive, which earned international acclaim for its powerful exploration of family, identity, and cultural heritage. The book won several awards, including the Kirkus Prize for Fiction in 2019.
Notable Works or Actions
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- Faces in the Crowd (2014): Her first novel, which explores themes of identity and belonging through a group of strangers' lives.
- Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions (2017): A personal essay about her experience helping migrant children prepare for their asylum interviews.
- Lost Children Archive (2018): A novel that delves into the complexities of family relationships and cultural heritage through a road trip from New York to Mexico.
Impact and Legacy
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Valeria Luiselli's work has made significant contributions to contemporary literature, focusing on themes that are both deeply personal and universally relevant.
Her writing often explores the experiences of marginalized communities, shedding light on issues such as migration, identity, and cultural displacement. Her unique voice and perspective have resonated with readers worldwide.
Luiselli's commitment to social justice through her writing is evident in works like Tell Me How It Ends, which has not only raised awareness about migrant children but also contributed to ongoing discussions around immigration policies.
Why They Are Widely Quoted or Remembered
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Valeria Luiselli is widely quoted and remembered for several reasons:
Her unique perspective on the human experience, especially in relation to identity, culture, and migration.
The power of her writing to evoke empathy and understanding towards marginalized communities.
* Her commitment to using her platform as a writer to advocate for social justice and raise awareness about critical issues.
Overall, Valeria Luiselli's body of work is a testament to the transformative power of literature. Through her writing, she not only shares her own experiences but also challenges readers to think critically about the world around them.
Quotes by Valeria Luiselli
Perhaps the right word is recognition, in the sense of re-cognizing, knowing again, for a second or third time, like an echo of a knowledge, which brings acknowledgment, and possibly forgiveness.
But rereading is not like remembering. It’s more like rewriting ourselves: the subtle alchemy of reinventing our past through the twice-underscored words written by others.
Our final hours together were predictable: the temperature of the arguments rising, the almost comic melodrama of the play beginning. Faces, masks. One shouting, the other crying; and then, change masks. For one, two, three, six hours, until the world finally falls apart: tomorrow, this Sunday, next Wednesday, Christmas. But in the end, a strange peace, gathered from who knows what rotten gut.
New families, like young nations after violent wars of independence or social revolutions, perhaps need to anchor their beginnings in a symbolic moment and nail that instant in time. That night was our foundation, it was the night where our chaos became a cosmos.
The following day his outline appeared in white chalk on the asphalt. Did the hand of the person who skirted the coastline of his body tremble? The city, its sidewalks: an enormous blackboard- instead of numbers, we add up bodies.
Perhaps learning to speak is realizing, little by little, that we can say nothing about anything.
Real writers never show their teeth. Charlatans, in contrast, flash that sinister crescent when they smile. Check it out. Find photos of all the writers you respect, and you’ll see that their teeth remain a permanently occult mystery.
The person who walks too slowly could be plotting a crime or – even worse – might be a tourist.
But perhaps a person only has two real residences: the childhood home and the grave.
The devastation of the social fabric in Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and other countries is often thought of as a Central American “gang violence” problem that must be kept on the far side of the border. There is little said, for example, of arms being trafficked from the United States into Mexico or Central America, legally or not; little mention of the fact that the consumption of drugs in the United States is what fundamentally fuels drug trafficking in the continent.