Laura Alcoba, the memory of water in Argentina

Born in Argentina where she lived until the age of 10, Laura Alcoba had to go into exile in France with her family for political reasons. Lecturer at the University of Paris X-Nanterre, she is the author of several books including “Maneges, a little Argentine history”, her Argentine childhood under the military dictatorship, “White Garden”, “The Blue of the Bees”, “The Spider Dance” (Marcel Pagnol Prize). She received the support award from the Del Duca Foundation in 2013.


The writer Laura Alcoba in the studio at RFI (March 2023).


The shores of the Sweet Sea

“On March 14, 2021 at 3:50 p.m., Laura Alcoba was walking along the right bank of the Aven, between Pont-Aven and the Hénan mill, when she saw on the surface of the water, between the branches and the rocks, drawing of a heart. The confusion of this almost magical vision awakens his memory. At the Aven superimposes the image of the Río de la Plata, which the first Spanish navigators had named the Sweet Sea, so vast was the river. Then appear, as in a hallucinatory walk, the essential moments of her life, those which built her and made her one of the most talented writers of today. Always caught between two rivers, two languages, two countries. Laura Alcoba has forgotten nothing of her clandestine childhood in Argentina. This inner journey in the form of a self-portrait is like a raft that leads to the wildest and sometimes most painful points of a life.” (Presentation of published by Mercure de France)

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