Book of Emma Reyes
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€17.50
In this startlingly original memoir, composed of twenty-three letters written over the course of thirty years, Emma Reyes describes in vivid, painterly detail the remarkable courage and limitless imagination of a young girl growing up with nothing. Hailed as an instant classic when first published in Colombia in 2012, nine years after the death of its author, the portrait that emerges from this clear-eyed account inspires awe at the stunning early life of a gifted writer and artist who was encouraged in her writing by Gabriel García Márquez, but whose talent remained hidden for far too long.
Emma Reyes (1919-2003) was a Colombian painter and intellectual whose letters were first published in 2012. She grew up in extreme poverty and escaped a convent for orphan girls at age nineteen. Illiterate, she travelled wherever she could and dedicated most of her life to painting and drawing, slowly breaking through as an artist and forging friendships with some of the most distinguished European and Latin American artists, writers and intellectuals of the twentieth century. She lived in Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Jerusalem, Washington and Rome before settling in Paris. The year she passed away, the French government named her a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters.