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Letters from Latin America: Literature, poetry and politics
Women writers fearlessly tackle the brutal histories of Brazil and El Salvador, national identity and family conflict

CAROLYN FORCHE’S What You Have Heard Is True (Allen Lane, £25) is an electrifying memoir in which the acclaimed US poet tells how she became an activist in El Salvador during the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Forche’s was a trial by fire. She recounts how, as a 27- year-old poet and young teacher living in southern California, she became involved in El Salvador’s civil war through her contact with Leonel Gomez, nephew of Salvadorian poet Claribel Alegria.

A remarkable story of a woman’s radical act of empathy and her fateful encounter with the man who will eventually change her life and career as a poet, it starts in 1977, just a few months before the beginning of a 12-year civil war that would plunge El Salvador into one of the bloodiest and most violent conflicts in Latin America.

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