“We were in the middle of the pandemic, and it was more a crazy idea resulting from months of lockdown than a project. The famous name, which pays tribute to the first Latin American woman to win the Nobel Literature Prize, Chilean Gabriela Mistral, did not deserve less.

Yes, the same year marked by the sanitary crisis, confinement, social distancing and face masks, was the year that Andrea Stefanoni, Carla D’Elia and Julian de Dios chose to “give birth” to La Mistral: a bookstore “conceived” in Argentina, which today raises proudly above calle Travesía del Arenal número 2, some 820 feet from Puerta del Sol (Gate of the Sun) in Madrid. “What a moment to come into this world!,” is what anyone would say remembering how surreal everything we have been since then. She died on November 24, 2015, in Buenos Aires at the age of 92.It was born in the Cosmopolitan city of Buenos Aires on a warm November night of 2020. In 2007, she received the Página/12 New Novel Award for Las primas ( Cousins). She translated and wrote critical essays on poets such as Isidore Ducasse, Conde de Lautréamont, François Villon and Arthur Rimbaud for the translations of the latter two authors she received the Iron Cross decoration granted by the French government.

In Paris she lived in the company of Violette Leduc and became a friend of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Eugène Ionesco and Juliette Gréco. She studied Psychology at the University of Paris, where she self-exiled for 25 years after the Liberating Revolution.

In 1948, Jorge Luis Borges personally handed her the Initiation Award (Premio Iniciación) for her book El solitario. She was an adviser to the Institute of the Child’s Psychology and Re-education where she met and became intimate friends with Eva Perón. Aurora Venturini was born in 1921 in La Plata, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Las primas by Aurora Venturini