'Flora Alejandra Pizarnik (29 April 1936 – 25 September 1972) was an Argentine poet. Her idiosyncratic and thematically introspective poetry has been considered "one of the most unusual bodies of work in Latin American literature", and has been recognized and celebrated for its fixation on "the limitation of language, silence, the body, night, the nature of intimacy, madness, [and] death". Pizarnik studied philosophy at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and worked as a writer and a literary critic for several publishers and magazines. She lived in Paris between 1960 and 1964, where she translated authors such as Antonin Artaud, Henri Michaux, Aimé Cesairé and Yves Bonnefoy. She also studied history of religion and French literature in La Sorbonne. Back in Buenos Aires, Pizarnik published three of her major works: Los trabajos y las noches, Extracción de la piedra de locura and El infierno musical as well as a prose work titled, La condesa sangrienta. In 1969 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship and later, in 1971, a Fulbright Fellowship. On September 25, 1972, she died by suicide after ingesting an overdose of secobarbital. Her work has influenced generations of authors in Latin America. Biography Early life Flora Alejandra Pizarnik was born on April 29, 1936, in Avellaneda, a city within the Greater Buenos Aires metropolitan area, Argentina, to Jewish immigrant parents from Rovno (now Ukraine).Biografía literaria Her parents were Elías Pizarnik (Pozharnik) and Rejzla Bromiker. She had a difficult childhood, struggling with acne and self-esteem issues, as well as having a stutter. She adopted the name Alejandra as a teenager. As an adult, she had a clinical diagnosis of schizophrenia. Career A year after entering the department of philosophy and letters at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, Pizarnik published her first book of poetry, La tierra más ajena (1955). She took courses in literature, journalism, and philosophy at the university of Buenos Aires Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, but dropped out in order to pursue painting with Juan Batlle Planas. Pizarnik followed her debut work with two more volumes of poems, La última inocencia (1956) and Las aventuras perdidas (1958). She was an avid reader of fiction and poetry. Beginning with novels, she delved into more literature with similar topics to learn from different points of view. This sparked an interest early on for literature and also for the unconscious, which in turn gave rise to her interest in psychoanalysis. Pizarnik’s