Yurkiévich, Saúl.

(La Plata, 1931 – Caumont-sur-Durance, France, 2005). Saúl Yurkievich is an Argentine poet and literary critic. He was born in 1931 in La Plata, where he was educated and began his academic career. In the 1950s he joined the avant-garde movement in Buenos Aires. Yurkievich career started as a scholar and critic of Latin American literature. His first published work, Valoración de Vallejo (1958), made him one of the most rigorous scholars of Vallejo's poetry, and of Latin American literature in general. Three years later, Yurkievich published his first poetry collection Volanda Linde Lumbre (1961).

His early interest and study of French language led him to Paris in 1962 to complete preparatory studies for a doctoral thesis, which was later published as Modernidad de Apollinaire. Most of Yurkievich's work was written in France, where he lived since 1968 working as professor of Latin American literature at the Université de Paris VIII (Vincennes). In Paris he maintained strong friendship and literary ties with writers such as Julio Cortázar, who later named him his literary executor.

Yurkievich taught courses and seminars on Latin American literature in several American universities including Harvard, Chicago, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, UCLA, Maryland, and Pittsburgh. He edited and compiled several books by Julio Cortázar. His critical work was published in several European and Latin American publications. He was also a member of the French publication Collectif Change.

Author of a remarkable poetic production rooted in the experimentalism of the 1960s, Yurkievich is mostly renowned for his vast, lucid, and elucidating critical oeuvre, which turned him in one of the best known literary critics in the Spanish-speaking world.