Esdras Parra

Esdras Parra was born in Santa Cruz de Mora, Mérida, on July13, 1929, and died in Caracas on November 18, 2004. She was a poet, fiction writer, essayist, translator, and visual artist. She studied Philosophy in Caracas at the Universidad Central de Venezuela and in Rome. She lived in Europe from 1960 until 1971. She was literary director for Monte Ávila Editores, coordinator of the supplement Papel Literario for the newspaper El Nacional, and editor in chief of Revista Imagen. She began her career as a writer with three paradigmatic books of fiction: El insurgente (1967), Por el norte el mar de las Antillas (1968) and Juego limpio (1968). Afterwards she devoted herself exclusively to poetry and drawing, publishing the collections Este suelo secreto (1995), winner of the II Bienal de Literatura Mariano Picón Salas, Antigüedad del frío (2000), and Aún no (2004), which appeared after her passing. Lo que trae el relámpago was published in Caracas by Fundación La Poeteca in 2021. It gathers the two poetry collections she left unpublished: Cada noche su camino, written between 1996 and 1997, was carefully revised for a definitive final version; and El extremado amor, with texts written between 2002 and 2003, never reached a finished draft, as she was interrupted by illness and death.