Luisa Futoransky

Luisa Futoransky was born in Argentina to Jewish parents who later moved to Israel. She herself has spent more than half her life away from her native country. She began her colorful and diverse career as a music student at the Conservatorio Municipal. During the late 1960s, while studying law at the University of Buenos Aires -- a profession she would never practice -- she began to study English poetry with Jorge Luis Borges. Luisa's first three collections of poetry, Trago Fuerte (Strong Drink, 1963), El corazón de los lugares (The Heart of Places, 1964), and Babel Babel (1968), were published during this period. She continued her literary studies in Rome and Siena.
From 1976 to 1981, she traveled in the Far East, where she taught opera at the National Academy of Music in Japan, and worked at Radio Peking in China. In 1981, she settled in Paris, where she has worked at Radio France, the French Ministry of Culture, the Centre Georges Pompidou, and Agence France Presse. Her published work includes prose and essays in addition to poetry, and much of it deals with themes of exile, displacement, identity, and language. Critics say her narrative voice is markedly female as well as feminist.
Her work has been translated into many other languages, including English, French, Hebrew, Portuguese, Japanese, and German. In 1990, she was named a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of the French Ministry of Culture. She received the Centre National des Lettres Fellowship in 1987 and 1993. In 1997, she was the Regent’s Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley. Her writing has been included in many international journals as well as anthologies such as The House of Memory: Stories by Jewish Women Writers of Latin America, and Miriam’s Daughters: Jewish Latin American Women Poets.