Diego Valverde Villena - Life

Life

Villena was born on April 6, 1967 in Lima, Peru. In 1971, when he was four, his family left Peru for Spain. Like many other writers, he studied at a Jesuit school, San Jose (St Joseph), in Valladolid. From 1985 to 1991 he earned three BLitt (Spanish, English and German) in the University of Valladolid. During this time he also attended courses on language and literature in the University of Salamanca (Scandinavian languages), University of Edinburgh (Modernism), University College Dublin (Irish literature and culture) and the University of Wroclaw (Polish language and literature). Afterwards he undertook doctorate studies on Medieval English Literature in the University of Oxford, the University of Heidelberg, the University of Tübingen, the University of Chicago and the Complutense University of Madrid.

Valverde Villena worked as a lecturer in several universities, mainly in the Universidad Mayor de San Andres (La Paz, Bolivia), where he taught Medieval Lyric, Baroque Lyric and Poetry between 1996 and 1998. From 2002 to 2004 he worked in the staff of the Secretary of State for Culture in Spain.

He has translated into Spanish literary works written by Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, John Donne, George Herbert, Ezra Pound, Emily Dickinson, Paul Éluard, Valery Larbaud, Nuno Júdice, Jorge Sousa Braga, E.T.A. Hoffmann and Paul Celan.