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José Watanabe, born in Laredo, a large sugar cane farm in northern Peru, is widely recognized as one of the all-time major Peruvian poets. His father was a Japanese immigrant and his mother a peruvian of Andean origin.
In a very intimate way Watanabe fuses his two deep cultural backgrounds in a brief but intense poetic work. Watanabe won the award Young Poet of Peru in 1971 with his first book, Album de Familia. After a silence of almost two decades, he resumed publishing in 1989 with El huso de la palabra. After that came Historia Natural (1994), Cosas del Cuerpo (1999) and Habitó entre Nosotros (2002). In 2000, he published in Colombia an anthology named El Guardián del Hielo and in 2004 he published in Spain Elogio del Refrenamiento a comprehensive anthology that won numerous accolades.
"He is one of the few living Peruvian authors that can be qualified as essential" wrote Esperanza Lopez Parada in Babelia, the literary supplement of El Pais.
Also of note, Watanabe is involved in the film industry as a screenwriter, production designer and art director.