Quote by Cristina Peri Rossi: “Exile is not a place but a condition: the permanent nostalgia for elsewhere.”

Exile is not simply being away from home — it is an internal state you carry with you everywhere. The longing for another place, another self, another time becomes a way of being in the world that follows you even if you return.

Uruguay's military dictatorship, which began in 1973, forced thousands of intellectuals, artists, and activists into exile. Peri Rossi fled to Barcelona, part of a massive diaspora of Latin American writers scattered across Europe and the Americas by right-wing coups throughout the 1970s.

Uruguayan poet and novelist who was forced into exile in Spain in 1972 after the military coup in Uruguay, where she remained and became a major voice in Spanish-language literature. Her work, including the novel The Ship of Fools, interweaves political exile, sexuality, and linguistic experimentation.