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Non fiction

“Diccionario” Antón Avilés de Taramancos

By X. Amancio Liñares Giraut, Antonio Puentes Chao

About this book

This is a complete biography of Antón Avilés Vinagre (de Taramancos). Every year the Galician Royal Academy of the Letters chooses a significant author and organises a wide campaign to give visibility to her or his work and life in the so called Día das Letras Galegas (day of Galician letters). Antón Avilés de Taramancos was honoured in this way in 2003. He was a poet, author of short-stories, translator, journalist, cultural activist, president of the Association of Galician Writers… The different chapters in this book bring us closer to his life and work, with synoptic charts where we can see his relationship with Galicia and the world during his lifetime. The book also includes exercises for school children and a selection of his most important texts. It includes a chapter with different illustrations. There is an introduction by academician Salvador García-Bodaño.

Book fragment

AUTHOR

Eleven years after his death in March 1992 we commemorate the life of the poet Antón Avilés Vinagre, “Avilés de Taramancos”, the name of the village in which he was born, there by the estuary of Noia, by the road that goes up from Porto do Son to Ribeira.

Antón, was a self-taught writer and a master in activism and poetic taste; he was not a member of the academy, professor or degree-holder. He worked as writer, he know the world of the Galician immigrants in America and finally and unwillingly became a renowned bar tender.

1. HIS FIRST YEARS (“And as a child I jump by the riverside”)

José Antonio Avilés Vinagre —his official name, that on his birth certificate and I.D.— was born in a family of farmers and fishermen in the village of Taramancos, belonging to Boa, in Noia. It was a country house, a congested place where he was close to small boats and agricultural gear. He was very close to the beach of Testal, full of cockle and there the gear for both sea and land was –and still is- kept because, as historian Xosé Ramón Barreiro Fernández –now president of the Galician Royal Academy- wrote…