Guillermo Blanco
(Guillermo Blanco Martínez; Talca, 1926-Santiago, 2010) Chilean writer.With a simple and fluid style, with short sentences that are occasionally repetitive, and an appreciable aptitude for humor and satire, his stories tend to focus on everyday events and characters, of which he accurately portrays the affective aspects.
Guillermo Blanco
Guillermo Blanco attended his first studies at the Colegio San Tarcisio in his hometown, and later he would study humanities at the Instituto Luis Campino in Santiago.His fondness for reading (due to the influence of his grandfather) and his first literary essays date from this early period.He then began a career in architecture, which would not be completed, and worked as editor of the magazine Amargo, which he himself had founded in 1946 together with Hugo Montes and others.
In 1951 he married Lucía Cristi Taulis; in that same decade, his narrative began to deserve recognition.In 1956 he won the El Mercurio National Contest with Farewell to Rhubarb , a magnificent story inspired by his own childhood.In 1957 he won first prize in two international competitions: the Latin American Contest of the Mexican newspaper El Nacional with his short story La Esperanza , and the Chile-Peru Contest of the American Book Association with his short story The hand .
Also in 1957 he published the collection of stories Only a man and the sea .Two years later the novel Misa de requiem appeared, winner of the Alerce contest.In the early 1960s, he wrote in collaboration with Carlos Ruiz-Tagle the extensive narrative entitled Revolution in Chile (1962).This work meant an intermission in which the author, according to Maximino Fernández, "joined his humorous vein to that of Carlos Ruiz-Tagle to give a funny vision of a foreigner about our country".Both authors concealed their identities, publishing the work under the pseudonym Sillie Utternut.
Perhaps his best known work is Grace and the Stranger (1965), a story of adolescent love affairs.In 1975 he published Contando a Chile , illustrated by the famous cartoonist Lucas (Renzo Pecchenino) as part of a youth series on cultural aspects of the country, which included titles such as Reading Chile , by Hugo Montes and Hearing Chile by Samuel Claro.
His later works include Clean Shirt (1989), a novel based on the story of Francisco Maldonado, a Jew living in Chile in the 17th century and burned by the Inquisition; in Vecina Amable (1990) he imagined and related the experiences of a young neighbor of the Virgin Mary; in El joder y la gloria (1997) he satirized the superficiality of contemporary culture.Linked, like José Donoso, to the so-called generation of 1950, Guillermo Blanco is also the author of numerous journalistic articles, which earned him, among other distinctions, the National Journalism Prize (1999).He also taught at university and was a Member of the Chilean Academy of Language and Correspondent of the Royal Spanish Academy.
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