Gabriela Mistral

In 1914, a young schoolteacher from the north of Chile entered three sonnets in a national poetry contest in Santiago, the Juegos Florales. The poems, which dealt with love and death, were raw and intensely personal, and she signed them with a name that nobody had heard before: Gabriela Mistral. It has been suggested that she was afraid for her job. A rural teacher who wrote so openly about passion might not have been trusted with other people's children for very long.

The sonnets won first prize, and from then on, it was the invented name that appeared on everything she published. It is generally believed to have been formed from the names of two European poets she admired, the Italian Gabriele D'Annunzio and the Frenchman Frédéric Mistral. Other readers prefer a different explanation: the archangel Gabriel and the mistral, a fierce wind that sweeps across the south of France.

Her own story had begun far from any literary circle. She was born in 1889 in Vicuña, in the Elqui Valley, and grew up in Montegrande, a tiny village surrounded by the Andes. Her father, a teacher who also wrote verses, abandoned the family when she was about three. By the age of fifteen, with almost no formal training, she was already working as a teacher's assistant in a village near La Serena. For years afterwards, she was sent from one modest school to another, from the deserts of the north to Punta Arenas, near the southern tip of the continent.

She is often described as a tall, serious woman with a steady gaze and a deep devotion to children, especially poor ones. She was also generous with books. In 1920, while she was running a school in Temuco, she met a shy teenager who dreamed of becoming a poet. She recommended books to him and encouraged him to keep writing, and a friendship began that lasted the rest of her life. The boy is now known to the world as Pablo Neruda.

In 1922, she was invited by the Mexican education minister, José Vasconcelos, to help reform the country's schools and libraries. That same year, her first book, Desolación, was published in New York. From 1932 until her death, she represented Chile as a consul in cities as different as Madrid, Lisbon, Naples and Los Angeles. Then, in November 1945, came the news that would change her life: she had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. No Latin American writer had ever received it before.

Today, her face is printed on Chile's 5,000-peso note, and schools all over the continent bear the name she chose for that first contest. Yet the woman who received the prize from the King of Sweden in December 1945 had not been born Gabriela Mistral. The girl from the Elqui Valley had been given a very different name at birth: Lucila Godoy Alcayaga.