María Elena Walsh

María Elena Walsh was an Argentine poet, novelist, playwright, singer-songwriter and composer, born in Villa Sarmiento, Buenos Aires Province, on 1 February 1930 and died in Buenos Aires on 10 January 2011. She is best known for her songs and books for children, a body of work that many Argentines have grown up with and that made her one of the country's most beloved cultural figures.

She came from an educated middle-class family and trained at the Prilidiano Pueyrredón National School of Fine Arts, graduating as a drawing and painting teacher. She began publishing poems in magazines and newspapers while still a teenager, and her first collection, Otoño imperdonable (1947), won attention in Spanish-speaking literary circles. After time in the United States she returned to Argentina, and, weary of the censorship she perceived under Perón, moved to Paris in 1952 with the singer Leda Valladares. The two formed a duo that performed northern Argentine folk music across Europe for about a decade, until it dissolved in 1962.

From the late 1950s she worked in television and children's theatre, with shows such as Canciones para mirar (1962), in which she created characters like Doña Disparate and the Rey Bombo. In the second half of the 1960s she turned toward songs for adults, working with the musician Oscar Cardozo Ocampo on pieces such as "Zamba para Pepe" and "Barco quieto". In 1978 she stopped writing and performing, feeling that the show was over. After the return of democracy she took on public roles and received honours, including an honorary doctorate from the National University of Córdoba in 1990.

Her legacy is twofold. Her children's work blends the nonsense tradition she absorbed from the rhymes her father sang with a humour and musicality that remain widely loved. Her songs and poetry for adults combine lyricism with social commentary. She released more than twenty records and wrote more than fifty books, and her songs were recorded by artists such as Mercedes Sosa and Joan Manuel Serrat.