Aguilar, Rosario Fiallos de (1938–)

Rosario Fiallos de Aguilar (b. 29 January 1938), Nicaraguan novelist. Born in León, Nicaragua, Aguilar has lived her entire life in the same city except for her studies in the United States (1955–1956) and a brief period in Costa Rica during the turmoil of the Sandinista revolution. Her first novel, Primavera sonámbula (1964), is the story of a young woman tottering between sanity and insanity. Aquel mar sin fondo ni playa (1974) tells the haunting story of a stepmother's guilt and her rejection of a severely retarded child. Siete relatos sobre el amor y la guerra (1986) is a collection of stories linked thematically by the Sandinista fight to oust the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza. Her 1992 novel, La niña blanca y los pájaros sin pies, re-creates the lost female voices of the Spanish conquest of Central America. While Aguilar denies she is a feminist writer, her novels all center around women, maternity, and the consequences of rejecting motherhood, the Latin American social imperative for women. In 1999, Aguilar became the first woman to be admitted as miembro de número to the Academia Nicaragüense de la Lengua. She won the VI Premio Internacional de Literatura Latinoamericana y del Caribe Gabriela Mistral for her novel La Promesante in 2001. The Latin American literary critic Raymond Souza called her "one of the best-kept secrets in contemporary Spanish American fiction."

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aguilar's fiction is treated at length by Raymond D. Souza in La historia en la novela hispanoamericana moderna (1988) and "Novel and Context in Costa Rica and Nicaragua," Romance Quarterly 33, no. 4 (1986): 453-462. See also the interview of Edward W. Hood with Aguilar, "Una conversación con Rosario Aguilar," in South Eastern Latin Americanist 37, no. 2 (1993): 15-21.

Additional Bibliography

Barbas-Rhoden, Laura. Writing Women in Central America: Gender and the Fictionalization of History. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2003.

González, Ann. "Find More Like This 'Las mujeres de mi país': An Introduction to the Feminist Fiction of Rosario Aguilar." Revista/Review Interamericana 23.1-2 (Spring Summer 1993): 63-72.

Palacios, Nidia. Voces femeninas en la narrativa de Rosario Aguilar. Managua: Editorial Ciencias Sociales, 1998.

                                          Ann GonzÁlez