Guest of the ilb 2004
María Teresa Andruetto was born in 1954 in Arroyo Cabral, in
the Argentinian province of Córdoba, where she still lives today. After
studying Literature at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, she
specialised in Children’s and Young Adult's Literature. She worked as
editor at “Piedra Libre”, a literary magazine for children and
adolescents, and played a part in the founding of a research centre for
children’s and youth literature, to whose board of directors she
belonged for nine years. Since the end of the 1980’s she has published
scores of short stories, novels, poems and plays for adults, children
and young adults.
Her novel “Stefano” (1997; German: “Stefanos weite Reise”, 2003) was
her first novel for adolescents to appear in German. The book tells the
story of Stefano, who in the 1940’s migrated to Argentina to escape the
miserable conditions of his life in the Italian Piemont. Following an
adventurous crossover, Stefano initially scraped by with simple
jobs at a hotel for immigrants and at a cattle farm belonging to his
friend Pino. He soon moved on however, and joined the circus as a
saxophone player, before starting his own family in his new home.
Andruetto is a ‘taciturn narrator’, who, nevertheless, has much to
say. Unsentimental and plain, she describes the long journey of a young
man searching for his identity. By and by the fragmented memories and
impressions of the first-person narrator fit together like pieces of a
puzzle – ingeniously told from three perspectives. For the author,
“Stefano” also represents a journey along her father’s tracks. All the
same, she does not narrate with biographical adherence, rather she
relates his experience to the destiny of millions of immigrants who
crossed over to Argentina between the end of the 19th century and the middle of the 20th.
“If a book is a path towards knowledge, a way to grasp the world and
search for our own place within it, then Stefano gave me the
opportunity to re-experience the sensations of hunger, rootlessness and
estrangement experienced by men and women who, like those who leave
today, once arrived with the hope of a better life.”
María Teresa Andruetto has received many awards, among them one for
the children’s book “El anillo encantado” (1993) and “Huellas en la
arena” (1997). Several of her works for children and young adults can
be found in the “White Ravens” catalogue of the International
Children’s Library in Munich, such as the short story collection “La
mujer vampiro” (2001), in which she borrows elements from old horror
stories and weaves them into the everyday world of children in an
exciting and humorous way. In addition to her literary work Andruetto
teaches Creative Writing, trains mediators for children’s literature
and has taken up an editorial post at the publishing house Ediciones
del Eclipse.
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