Silvina Bullrich

Silvina Bullrich (October 4, 1915 – July 2, 1990) was a best-selling Argentine novelist, as well as a translator, screenwriter, critic, and academic. She was known in Argentina as la gran burguesa ("the great bourgeois lady").

Life and work Silvina Bullrich was born to María Laura Meyrelles de Bullrich, of Portuguese descent and to Rafael Bullrich (1877–1944), a distinguished Argentine cardiologist and Dean of the School of Medicine of the University of Buenos Aires. The second of three sisters, she was raised in a privileged background; despite the conservative Dr. Bullrich's disapproval, her mother occupied her free time introducing her daughters to classic literature and, unhappily married, frequently traveled with them to Paris, where Silvina's paternal grandfather had been a diplomat. She was unable to pursue a university diploma, but received a diploma in French language studies from the Buenos Aires Alliance Française.

She married Arturo Palenque in 1936 and had one son. Devoting herself to writing, she contributed literary reviews to La Nación (then Argentina's most-widely circulated daily) and in 1939, had a collection of poems (Vibraciones) and Calles de Buenos Aires ("Streets of Buenos Aires") published in Atlántida magazine. Remaining close to her friend and former collaborator, Jorge Luis Borges, Bullrich visited him shortly before his death in Geneva in 1986, and published her last work, La bicicleta, that year. A commentary on the country's recent financial crisis, "the bicycle" is also a slang term in Argentina analogous to "robbing Peter to pay Paul." A long-time smoker, she developed lung cancer and soon herself relocated to Geneva, seeking specialized medical care; Bullrich died there in 1990. She was buried in the Jardín de Paz cemetery in Pilar, Buenos Aires.