Violeta Parra ─ Life and Work

The Chilean artist Violeta Parra (1917 - 1967) is a cultural icon in Latin America. Parra is best known as the progenitor of the Latin American New Song but she also carried out cultural research, wrote poetry, created exhibition spaces and worked in the plastic arts, where she was the first Latin American artist to hold a solo exhibition in the Louvre gallery in Paris. There are numerous scholarly works about Parra in Spanish and French and a feature film about her life was released in 2012, yet, remarkably the only English language work on Parra is biographical. The proposed interdisciplinary collection will bring together research on the different areas of Parra's cultural production in order to present the full extent of her cultural praxis. It will present seminal work on Parra in English for the first time and bring this together with the most up-to-date research on Parra's oeuvre being carried out by leading academics in Chile, the United Kingdom, the USA and Germany. It will include chapters on her praxis in its widest sense; her work as a researcher; her music and poetry; her visual art and her performance space: La Carpa de la Reina (The Queen's Tent). Among the book's special features are a translation of a work about Parra written by the famous Chilean musician and writer Patricio Manns and an interview between Leonidas Morales and Violeta Parra's brother, the acclaimed Chilean poet Nicanor Parra. Lorna Dillon earned her PhD at King's College London in 2013. She is currently a network facilitator and assistant lecturer at the University of Kent.