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… The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale: Liliana Heker on writing under a repressive regime.

Liliana Heker was born in 1943 in Buenos Aires. Her writing career began at age 17 thanks to a letter she wrote Abelardo Castillo requesting a job at a magazine he edited. During Argentina's so called Dirty War in the seventies and eighties, she defiantly wrote and edited several well known left-wing literary journals, subtly protesting her country's violent, repressive regime, while defending the practice of literature. She also famously engaged in correspondence with Julio Cortázar, arguing that resistance to tyranny is better staged at home where the people can read your work and take faith from it, rather than from abroad.