Bad Times In Buenos Aires

Description

In 1993 Miranda France moved to South America, drawn to Buenos Aires as the intellectual hub of the continent, with its wealth of writers and its romantic, passionate and tragic history. She found that is was all these things, but it was also a terrible place to live. The inhabitants of Buenos Aires are famously unhappy. All over South America they are known for their arrogance, their fixation of Europe and their moodiness. Very soon, Miranda France encounters' bronca' - the simmering and barely controllable rage that is a staple feature of life in the Argentinian capital. She finds that 'bronca' has deep roots: the violence and racism of the first European settlers; the dictatorships, especially in the 1970s when so many 'disappeared'; even Evita Peron, for there was no rage to rival Evita's.

Miranda France was born in 1966 and was brought up in East Anglia and Sussex. She read Spainsh and Latin American Studies at Edinburgh University, which included a year in Madrid. In the early 1990s she lived in Brazil and Edinburgh and then Buenos Aires, and in 1996 she won the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for a piece about her time in Buenos Aires. Her first book, Bad Times in Buenos Aires, was published in 1998. She lives with her husband and young son in London