Circe Maia

Circe Maia, 2014

Circe Maia (born June 29, 1932 in Montevideo , Uruguay ) is a Uruguayan writer .

Raised in the first seven years of her life in Tacuarembó , the daughter of the notary Julio Maia, who died in 1983, and María Magdalena Rodríguez then returned to her hometown of Montevideo. She has a sister named Isis Abigail and a brother named Julio César (Lucho) who died in an accident at the age of 24 . At the age of eleven, Circe Maia wrote the volume of poems Plumitas in 1944 . Maia studied at the Instituto de Profesores Artigas (IPA) and the FHC of the Universidad de la República in the 1950s . At the age of 25 she married Ariel Ferreira . The marriage resulted in six children and so far eight grandchildren. In 1960 she joined the group Siete Poetas Hispanoamericanos (Seven Latin American Poets) led by Nancy Barcelo . In 1962 she interrupted her studies, returned to Tacuarembó and took up a position as a teacher of philosophy at a secondary school. In the early stages of the beginning dictatorship in Uruguay, her husband was arrested by the military in 1972 and spent two years in prison. In 1976 she had to give up teaching, which she resumed in 1985 after democracy was restored and continued until 2001. However, she still gives English lessons in a private educational institution. She used the professional break that had been imposed on her to improve her English and French skills and also to learn modern Greek. In 1983, at the age of 18, she lost one of her children in a traffic accident. Maia mainly published poetry, and in 1986 her first prose work, Destrucciones , was published . The following year, Un viaje a Salto, was her second publication of its kind. The latter was translated into English by Stephanie Stewart and was published in 2004 as the bilingual edition A Trip to Salto in Chicago by Swan Isle Press . In 2002, Circe Maia received the First Prize from the Uruguayan Ministry of Education and Culture ( MEC ) for the 2001 Breve sol . Maia's works have been translated into English, Italian, Portuguese and Swedish.

Works

• Plumitas (1944)
• En el tiempo (1st edition 1958, 2nd edition 1975)
• Presencia diaria (1964)
• El puente (1970)
• Cambio, permanencias (1st edition 1978, 2nd edition 1990)
• Dos voces (1981)
• Destrucciones (1986)
• Un viaje a Salto (1st edition 1987, 2nd edition 1992)
• Superficies (1990)
• Círculo de luz, círculo de sombra (1996), anthology of their works in Swedish
• De lo visible (1998)
• Breve sol (2001)
• Obra poética (2007)

literature

Nuevo Diccionario de la Cultura Uruguaya by Miguel Ángel Campodónico , Librería Linardi y Risso, 2003, pp. 200f

Web links

• Official website (Spanish), accessed March 2, 2012