Tomás Carrasquilla
| Tomás Carrasquilla | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
17 January 1858 Santo Domingo, Antioquia, Colombia |
| Died | 19 December 1940 (aged 82) Medellín, Antioquia, Colombia |
| Occupation | novelist, storyteller and essayist |
| Language | Spanish |
| Nationality | Colombian |
| Education | University of Antioquia Medellín - Colombia |
| Literary movement | Costumbrismo |
| Notable works |
Simón El Mago (1890) La Marqueza de Yolombó (1926) |
| Notable awards | Colombian Academy of Language – Jose María Vergara y Vergara National Prize of Literature and Science 1936 La Marqueza de Yolombó Cross of Boyacá |
Tomás Carrasquilla Naranjo (1858 – 1940) was a Colombian writer who lived in the Antioquia region. He dedicated himself to very simple jobs: tailor, secretary of a judge, storekeeper in a mine, and worker of the Ministry of Public Works. He was an avid reader, and one of the most original Colombian literary writers, greatly influencing the younger generation of his time and later generations. Carrasquilla was little known in his time, according to Federico de Onís, a scholar of Carrasquilla's works. It was only after 1936, when he was already 68 years old, when he was awarded with the National Prize of Literature, that Carrasquilla got a national recognition.Tomás Carrasquilla Library Park is named in his honor.
The Colombian civil wars of the second part of the 19th century prevented young Carrasquilla from continuing his studies at the University of Antioquia. A committed intellectual, Carrasquilla organized tertulias—social gatherings to read books and discuss them—in his Medellín house. Many young writers and intellectuals of his time joined those tertulias; from that time he was called "Maestro Tomás Carrasquilla." Among Carrasquilla's admirers was Colombian philosopher Fernando González Ochoa.
De Onís argues that Carrasquilla's work passed unknown in Colombia and abroad at the time because he lived during two different periods of Latin American literature: Costumbrismo and Romanticism, that had representatives like José Asunción Silva in Colombia, and the coming of Modernism as a reaction against Costumbrismo. As many classify the work of Carrasquilla as Costumbrist, so De Onís classifies him.
Carrasquilla's life straddled two centuries, becoming a link between two epochs in Colombia's history. When he was born in 1858, the country was called the Republic of New Granada, newly independent of Spain. In his work La Marqueza de Yolombó, Carrasquilla described how the most simple people of the end of the 18th century saw the events that broke the Colombia's political dependence on Spain.
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