Blanca Varela was born in Lima, Peru, on August 10, 1926, into a family of artists and writers. She studied at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos where she met Sebastián Salazar Bondy, Javier Sologuren, Francisco Bendezú, and Jorge Eduardo Eielson, with whom she would define a Peruvian poetry movement called “la Generación del 50.” It was there that she also met her future husband, the painter Fernando de Szyszlo.

Octavio Paz wrote the prologue to her first book, Ese puerto existe (1959), for which he also helped find a publisher in Mexico. Varela and de Szyszlo lived for at various points in Florence, Italy and Washington D.C., where she worked as a translator, before returning to Peru in 1962.

Her work has been translated into English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Russian, among other languages. She won the Octavio Paz Prize for poetry in 2001 and was the first woman to win the Federico Garcia Lorca City of Granada International Poetry Prize in 2006. Varela was honored in 2007 with Spain’s Queen Sofia Prize for Ibero-American Poetry. She passed away on March 12, 2009.