Margarita Aguirre

Margarita Aguirre (30 December 1925 – 15 December 2003) was a Chilean writer and critic. She was the friend and first biographer of Nobel-winning poet Pablo Neruda.

Biography Margarita Aguirre was the daughter of Sócrates Aguirre and Sofía Flores. Her siblings were named Francisco (Paco) and Perla.

She met the poet Pablo Neruda in Buenos Aires in 1933, where her father was Chile's deputy consul. Neruda held a diplomatic post in Argentina at the time. Despite the age difference (she was 8 years old and he was 29), they formed a lifelong friendship.

Aguirre would say that Neruda was "the last Santa Claus of my childhood," because to celebrate Christmas the poet disguised himself with a white cotton beard and a red robe and gave presents to her and other children.

The following year (1934), Neruda was designated consul of Chile in Barcelona. From there he maintained correspondence with the Aguirre-Flores family, and especially with Margarita, to whom he sent letters illustrated with comic drawings. He was "the best Argentine friend" of the poet, according to his own words. It was very difficult to organize this trip, because – as they were at the beginning of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union – Neruda had been denied entry into many of the countries of passage, due to their socialist ideas.|source=Margarita Aguirre

Aráoz took Aguirre to live in the arid countryside of Villa del Totoral in Córdoba Province, Argentina.

Biography of Neruda In the early 1960s, José Bianco, director of the Genio y Figura collection of the publisher , asked Aguirre to write a biography of Pablo Neruda. Aguirre accepted, with some reluctance: She was buried in the cemetery of , a small graveyard built next to a 19th-century church a short distance from Isla Negra, the location in which Neruda lived and was buried along with his wife Matilde Urrutia.

According to Guillermo García Corales in his essay on El huésped, Margarita Aguirre, through the desolation and nihilism of her characters, was the precursor of authors several decades later such as Gonzalo Contreras, Diamela Eltit, and .

Works The work of Margarita Aguirre includes novels, short stories, essays, and collections. 1980: Pablo Neruda Héctor Eandi, correspondencia