Juan Gelman was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina on May 3, 1930. He studied chemistry at the University of Buenos Aires, but decided to become a poet and joined the New Poetry movement in the 1950s. He was arrested in 1963 for joining the Communist Party. After he was released, he worked as a journalist and editor for several left-leaning magazines including Panorama, La Opinión and Noticias, which was tied to the radical guerrilla group Montoneros.
He was on a foreign public relations tour for the Montoneros to highlight alleged human rights abuses when the military took over the country in 1976. Some 30,000 people are thought to have been murdered, kidnapped and tortured during the seven-year military dictatorship including his son and pregnant daughter-in-law. Through a source in the Roman Catholic Church, he found out that his daughter-in-law gave birth before being killed, but it would take him 22 years to find his granddaughter, who was secretly given to a Uruguayan police officer and his wife for adoption. He renounced his membership in the Montoneros in 1979, which provoked the radical group to accuse him of treason and sentence him to death.
He spent the rest of his life in exile. He wrote more than 20 collections of poetry and won several awards including Juan Rulfo Award in 2000, the Pablo Neruda Award in 2005, the Queen Sofía Award in 2005, and the Cervantes Prize in 2007. He died from leukemia on January 14, 2014 at the age of 83.
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