35 Facts About Gabriela Mistral

Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, known by her pseudonym Gabriela Mistral, was a Chilean poet-diplomat, educator and humanist.

Gabriela Mistral's portrait appears on the 5,000 Chilean peso bank note.

Gabriela Mistral respected her sister greatly, despite the many financial problems that Emelina brought her in later years.

Gabriela Mistral's father, Juan Geronimo Godoy Villanueva, was a schoolteacher.

Gabriela Mistral abandoned the family before she was three years old, and died, alone since estranged from the family, in 1911.

In 1904 Gabriela Mistral published some early poems, such as Ensonaciones, Carta Intima and Junto al Mar, in the local newspaper El Coquimbo: Diario Radical, and La Voz de Elqui using a range of pseudonyms and variations on her civil name.

In 1906, Gabriela Mistral met a railway worker, Romelio Ureta, her first love, who killed himself in 1909.

Gabriela Mistral was awarded first prize in a national literary contest Juegos Florales in the Chilean capital, Santiago.

Gabriela Mistral had been using the pen name Gabriela Mistral since June 1908 for much of her writing.

Gabriela Mistral formed her pseudonym from the names of two of her favorite poets, Gabriele D'Annunzio and Frederic Mistral or, as another story has it, from a composite of the Archangel Gabriel and the mistral wind of Provence.

In 1922, Gabriela Mistral released her first book, Desolation, with the help of the Director of Hispanic Institute of New York, Federico de Onis.

Gabriela Mistral's work was a turn from modernism in Latin America and was marked by critics as direct, yet simplistic.

Gabriela Mistral later identified the obstacle to her entry as the school's chaplain, Father Ignacio Munizaga, who was aware of her publications in the local newspapers, her advocacy of liberalizing education and giving greater access to the schools to all social classes.

Gabriela Mistral had her join in the nation's plan to reform libraries and schools, to start a national education system.

Gabriela Mistral included works by both Latin American and European writers.

Gabriela Mistral's autodidacticism was remarkable, a testimony to the flourishing culture of newspapers, magazines, and books in provincial Chile, as well as to her personal determination and verbal genius.

Gabriela Mistral read his poems and recommended reading for him.

Gabriela Mistral made a living, at first, from journalism and then giving lectures in the United States and in Latin America, including Puerto Rico.

Gabriela Mistral variously toured the Caribbean, Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina, among other places.

Gabriela Mistral lived primarily in France and Italy between 1926 and 1932.

Gabriela Mistral published hundreds of articles in magazines and newspapers throughout the Spanish-speaking world.

Gabriela Mistral considered Juan Miguel as a son and she called him Yin Yin.

On 15 November 1945, Gabriela Mistral became the first Latin American, and fifth woman, to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Gabriela Mistral received the award in person from King Gustav of Sweden on 10 December 1945.

Gabriela Mistral's remains were returned to Chile nine days later.

Some of Gabriela Mistral's best known poems include Piececitos de Nino, Balada, Todas Ibamos a ser Reinas, La Oracion de la Maestra, El Angel Guardian, Decalogo del Artista and La Flor del Aire.

Gabriela Mistral wrote and published some 800 essays in magazines and newspapers; she was a well-known correspondent and highly regarded orator both in person and over the radio.

Gabriela Mistral's work is characterized by including gray tones in her literature; sadness and bitterness are recurrent feelings on it.

However, since her youth as a teacher in a rural school, Gabriela Mistral had a great affection for children that shows throughout her writing.

The publication of the letters Gabriela Mistral wrote to Dana in the volume Nina errante, edited by Pedro Pablo Zegers, supported the idea that the two had a long-lasting romantic relationship that comforted Gabriela Mistral in her last years.

Notwithstanding these hypotheses about the claimed romance between them, Doris Dana, who was 31 years younger than Gabriela Mistral, denied explicitly in her last interview that her relationship with Gabriela Mistral was ever romantic or erotic, and described it as the relationship between a stepmother and her stepdaughter.

Gabriela Mistral has been an influential part for Latin American Poetry.

The voice emitted from the mouth of Gabriela Mistral was able to shake the world and create a dent to society that opened the eyes and cleared the ears of those who are willing to hear her voice.

Since very little is known of her first love, we do know that his death helped to create Gabriela Mistral's poems filled with themes of death and despair, perhaps hatred toward God.

Some of Gabriela Mistral's poems are translated into Nepali by Suman Pokhrel, and collected in an anthology titled Manpareka Kehi Kavita.