Event: “Escritura y autofiguración en los diarios de María Luisa Puga” with Irma López and Patricia Puga. This event is free and open to the public. Lecture in Spanish without translation.
When: 4 p.m., Thursday, February 15, 2018.
Where: Benson Latin American Collection, 2nd floor conference room
Background: LLILAS Benson celebrates the opening of the María Luisa Puga Papers with a lecture by Irma López, professor of Spanish at Western Michigan University and author of Historia, escritura e identidad: La novelística de María Luisa Puga. The papers of Puga, a celebrated Mexican author, were donated to the Benson Collection by her sister, Patricia Puga, in 2017.
A Mexican novelist and short-story writer, María Luisa Puga (1944–2004) was the winner of numerous prestigious literary awards and highly esteemed by her peers. She left a voluminous set of diaries consisting of 327 notebooks, spanning from 1972 through 2004 — “a truly remarkable document of struggles both personal and artistic,” in the words of José Montelongo, Mexican Studies Librarian at the Benson Collection.
Written in a beautiful hand, with occasional doodle-like illustrations, the diaries contain the entire trajectory of Puga’s celebrated literary works and thus are of enormous research value. The pages also carry within them a poignant emotional charge: the author was someone for whom putting pen to paper was a vital activity in her art and thought, and her diaries are an almost visceral expression of her self.
The lecture by Irma López will be followed by a reception, with Patricia Puga as an honored guest.
Free and open to the public. The lecture will be presented in Spanish without translation.
A Life in Diaries: The María Luisa Puga Papers will be on display in the main reading room at the Benson Collection beginning on February 15, 2018. The exhibit contains select materials from the Puga archive.
