Peri Rossi, Cristina

(1941– )

   Uruguayan journalist, poet, and novelist. Born in Montevideo, Uruguay, Peri Rossi began her professional life as a middle-school teacher and journalist. She later published several collections of poetry and short stories while in her twenties. She collaborated in the weekly Marcha, closed by the military in 1970. In 1972, as a member of a coalition of left-wing parties in Montevideo, she was forced into exile in Spain, where she still resides. She has been the recipient of several honors, among them the 1992 Ciudad de Barcelona award for Bábel bárbara, judged the best volume of poetry published in Spanish in 1991.

   A prolific writer of over 18 collections of short stories and poetry, as well as novels, Peri Rossi used symbolism and allegory to explore the repression in Uruguay through such works as Ship of Fools (1984), perhaps her best-known novel. In it she examines the fragility of the human psyche and offers a feminist critique of patriarchal society. In works that combine the fantastic, the erotic, and the political, Peri Rossi’s narrative suggests the possibility that an escape from the rational might be in itself an escape toward individual freedom.