El veintiséis de octubre/October 26th

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¡Feliz cumpleaños a ... Miguel Otero Silva (1908-1985)!

Photo from poeticious.com
Miguel Otero Silva was a Venezuelan writer and politician whose 1955 novel, Casas Muertas (Dead Houses), won the Premio Nacional de Literatura (National Literature Prize). A Marxist in his youth, he was repeatedly forced into exile during his life as he fought for free speech and against dictatorial governments. His first political activity was doing Venezuela's Student's Week in 1928, in which he engaged in activities and then a military coup against then-dictator Juan Vicente Gomez. He was forced in to exile, and it was in exile that he worked on his first novel, Fiebre (Fever), published in 1939. In 1943 he founded the daily newspaper El Nacional along with his father. In 1949, three years after marrying fellow journalist María Teresa Castillo, Otero Silva left the Communist Party of Venezuela and dedicated himself exclusively to writing. After the establishment of a democratic state in Venezuela in 1958, he was elected to the Venezuelan senate and was awarded the National Prize for Journalism. In the 70s, he was active in founding La Galería de Arte Nacional and supporting the Instituto Nacional de Cultura y Bellas Artes (INCIBA). He won the Lenin Peace Prize in 1979. For his obituary in The New York Times (in English), click HERE. For a 30 minute "documentary" on him (in Spanish), click HERE. For a short article (in Spanish) on Otero Silva's granddaughter Alejandra Otero, who is the director of the newspaper he founded (El Nacional), click HERE.

For resources for teaching Spanish, Level 1 through AP, CLICK HERE.

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