At the age of 93, the writer Angélica Gorodischer passed away, one of the most important voices in Argentine literature and science fiction in Ibero-America, who through works such as “Kalpa Imperial” or “Trafalgar”, introduced dystopia to portray a society unequal and unfair.
“I don’t want to die in therapy or in a sanatorium. I hope to do it in my bed, calm, with someone holding my hand. I don’t want a wake either, and I do want to be buried in a garden cemetery, with flowers, in an ordinary drawer, that it rots soon,” he wrote in a letter he left and was quoted by the newspaper La Capital de Rosario.
The writer lived since her childhood in that city, in Swiss Tire, a southern neighborhood, she had three children and since 1948 she was married to the architect Sujer Gorodischer. Her death was confirmed to Télam by her family.
Angélica Beatriz del Rosario Arcal de Gorodischer was born in Buenos Aires on July 28, 1928 and during an interview in 2012 she said that during her early years she preferred books to dolls and that he admired writers like Virginia Woolf and Silvina and Victoria Ocampo.
He began publishing in 1960 and after winning the Vea y Lea story contest in 1964, he began to publish regularly.
His extensive narrative work includes the novels “Opus dos”, “Kalpa Imperial”, “Alabastro Vases”, “Mango Juice” and “The Night of the Innocent” and the storybooks “Stories with Soldiers”, ” The Wigs”, “Electronic Moon Caste”, “Trafalgar”,
“How to succeed in life”, “The Republics”, “Menta”, “Dear friend” and “The girls”.
His short story “The Dark Chamber”, the story of a young member of a Jewish colony in the province of Entre Ríos in the 19th century, was made into a film by director María Victoria Menis in 2008.
She was a pioneer of science fiction in Argentina, but she abandoned the genre a long time ago. in 2003 his novel “Kalpa Imperial” was translated into English by the greatest female figure of Anglo-Saxon science fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018).
Rosarina by adoption, Gorodischer was named illustrious citizen of that city in 2007, and in 2012, outstanding personality of the culture of Buenos Aires. She in turn in 2017 she was honored at the National Library during the visit of the Canadian Margaret Atwood.
In May of the same year she was distinguished with the title of doctor honoris causa by Uncuyo (National University of Cuyo) and upon receiving her diploma she assured that “the book is the door of the universe”.
Gorodischer addressed the students and readers who accompanied her, and invited everyone to read and count in order to “discover the universe”.
“The recipe for writing a book is to tell things that never happened to people, that never existed”Angelica Gorodischer
“The recipe for writing a book is to tell things that never happened to people, that never existed,” the writer explained to the vice-rector of Uncuyo, Jorge Barón, who, together with the dean of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, Adolfo Cueto, gave the title to the writer in a meeting in which books, literature and the pleasure of reading to discover the world were the protagonists.
Gorodischer too won the World Fantasy Award for his career in 2011, which are awards that have been awarded annually since 1975 at the World Fantasy Convention and are held each year in a different American city.
In May 2020 Clara Obligado, Lola Robles, Martín Castagnet and Ximena Gonzalez presented “Tumba de Jaguares”, the reissue of their baroque novel (originally published in 2005) along with their nouvelles “Variables hidden”, “La uncertainty” and “Contar from scratch”, which thematized the disappearance of a person and the impossibility of recovering the body.
The publication was part of the Series of the Two Centuries of Eudeba (University Publishing House of Buenos Aires), a collection of classics of Argentine literature and thought that the publishing house launched on the occasion of the Bicentennial of the May Revolution.
