Venezuelan Literature

This article presents an overview of some of the most representative and influential writers and works from Venezuela in the genre of novel, poetry, short story, and essay, from the 19th to the 21st century. Although Venezuela has a rich literary culture and critically acclaimed authors—such as Rómulo Gallegos, Arturo Uslar Pietri, and Miguel Otero Silva—whose works have become Latin American classics, the country’s literature has remained for the most part underread and understudied outside its frontiers. The reasons for this relative invisibility have been the focus of many debates among intellectuals both inside and outside Venezuela, who have pointed—not without criticism—to the writers’ almost exclusive reliance on national publishing houses, the impossibility of a recognizable literary identity, and the lack of noteworthy innovation as some of the reasons behind it. Nevertheless, since the mid-1990s, a renewed interest in Venezuelan literature has become palpable; international publishing houses have awarded prestigious awards to works by Venezuelan authors (Alberto Barrera Tyszka’s novel Patria o muerte was the winner of the XI Premio Tusquets Editores de Novela, and Rafael Cadenas’s extensive poetic work won him in 2016 the Premio Internacional de Poesía Federico García Lorca, to mention but a few), several new anthologies have been published, and symposiums and conferences drawing scholars from all over the world have been organized on the topic by prestigious international universities and organizations. This has partly been due to the political events that have taken place in the country since the arrival to power of Hugo Chávez, which have made Venezuela—and thus the literature written there—a “hot topic” among academic circles, both national and international. Furthermore, recent waves of emigration have brought Venezuelan authors to many universities abroad, where they have given the country’s literature more exposure, in many cases with the help of social media and other online platforms. In light of these events, this article offers a chronology of Venezuelan literature as a whole rather than constructing a separate chronology for each genre, and thus serves as an introduction to the authors and works that critics consider fundamental in the evolution of the country’s literary history. While theater has been excluded from this selection, two references have been included that give an overview of Venezuela’s abundant theatrical production and the important role it has played in shaping the country’s cultural and political identity.