Cousins

Aurora Venturini was born in 1921 in La Plata, Buenos Aires, Argentina. 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. In 1948, Jorge Luis Borges personally handed her the Initiation Award (Premio Iniciación) for her book El solitario. She studied Psychology at the University of Paris, where she self-exiled for 25 years after the Liberating Revolution. 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 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 2007, she received the Página/12 New Novel Award for Las primas (Cousins). She died on November 24, 2015, in Buenos Aires at the age of 92.