Ciro Alegría Bazán, better known as Ciro Alegría, was a Peruvian journalist, politician, and writer born in Huamachuco on November 4th, 1909, and died in Lima on February 17th, 1967.
He completed his early studies in Trujillo, where he was taught by the poet and writer César Vallejo, and where he began collaborating with journalistic media. Committed to politics from a young age, his membership in the APRA (American Popular Revolutionary Alliance) earned him several prison terms and his subsequent exile to Chile in 1934.
During his exile, between Chile, Puerto Rico, and the United States, Alegría wrote his best-known works, championing the value of Indigenous people and cultivating regionalist novels, most notably El mundo es ancho y ajeno, for which he won the Grand Prize for Continental Novels in 1941.
Alegría married three times, and his widow, fellow writer Dora Varona, published several of his previously unpublished works, including a memoir, Mucha suerte con harto palo.
