Belén Gache facts for kids
Belén Gache (born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1960) is an amazing writer from Argentina and Spain. She creates novels and also writes in very new and experimental ways.
Belén Gache was born in Buenos Aires, but her family has roots in Spain and Gibraltar. Today, she lives in Madrid, Spain. She studied at the University of Buenos Aires and even taught there. She was a professor of narratology (the study of how stories are told) and literary theory (ideas about literature).
Belén Gache loves to try different ways of writing. She started with traditional stories, but then became a leader in electronic literature (writing that uses computers and the internet). Since 1996, she has created many unique digital and hypertext (stories with links that let you jump around) writings.
Her Novels
Belén Gache's novels are often called postmodern literature. This means they might break traditional rules of storytelling. Her books often have stories that are broken into pieces, feel very real, and are told by characters who might not be completely truthful.
She was inspired by minimalism (using very few words) and anti-novel (books that challenge what a novel should be). Her stories are usually told in the first person ("I") and in the present tense. They often feature female main characters who feel a bit out of place or even a little paranoid.
Her first novel, Luna India (Indian Moon), was published in 1994. It was even considered for a special award!
Her second novel, Divina Anarquia (Divine Anarchy), came out in 1999. This book explores how the narrator (the person telling the story) doesn't know much about her family history and makes up imaginary stories about it.
In 2004, she published Lunas eléctricas para las noches sin luna (Electric moons for moonless nights). This story takes place in 1910, during the 100th birthday celebrations of Argentina's independence. Buenos Aires was full of European immigrants back then. In this setting, a detective story unfolds with political secrets. It's told by a teenage girl who loves to make up stories and is the daughter of Spanish immigrants.
Digital and Experimental Writing
In 1995, Belén Gache started a group and website called Fin del Mundo (End of the World) with other artists in Buenos Aires. This is where she first put her interactive poems online. These were poems you could interact with!
In 2002, she released El libro del fin del mundo (The Book of the End of the World). This was a physical book, but it also came with a CD-ROM and links to more content online. It mixed different kinds of poetry, including visual poetry (poems that use shapes and images) and multimedia poetry (poems with sounds and videos).
In 2004, she tried something new with El blog del niño burbuja (The Bubbleboy blog). This was one of the first times someone wrote a fictional story as a blog.
One of her most famous works is Góngora Wordtoys (Soledades), which she put online in 2006. This collection of her "net-poems" (poems made for the internet) was created between 1996 and 2006. She wanted reading to be like solving a puzzle and also a fun game. These fourteen net-poems are inspired by older art movements that used ideas like randomness and repetition.
In 2011, she made another collection called Gongora WordToys. This one focused on the famous Spanish Baroque poet Luis de Góngora. She took his masterpiece, Soledades (Solitudes), and broke it apart to create new meanings.
Since 2013, Belén Gache has been working on the Kublai Moon project. This is an example of "distributed literature," meaning it's spread across many different online places like blogs, video sites, and even a tool that automatically creates poems! It's a science fiction story about a journey to the moon with the narrator's other self, Commander Aukan, and a robot named Halim.
Her Essays
Belén Gache also writes essays, which are non-fiction pieces that explore ideas. Her book of essays, Escrituras Nomades, del libro perdido al hipertexto (Nomadic Writings, from the lost book to hypertext), was published in 2006. In this book, she explores experimental and nonlinear literature (stories that don't follow a straight path). She shows how electronic literature uses ideas from older art movements like Dada, concrete poetry, Oulipo, and Fluxus.
She also wrote an essay called Narrating with New Media: What Happened with What has Happened?
