María Elena Walsh was an Argentine singer-songwriter, musician, writer, composer and poet who left her mark on several generations of Argentines. Manuelita La Tortuga, La Reina Batata and El Reino del Revés are songs that have accompanied Argentine childhood for decades.
Walsh was born and grew up in Ramos Mejía (now under the jurisdiction of Morón), on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, where she received an education tinged with the customs and habits of England, from where his father's family originated. At the age of 15 she published her first poems in such Argentine newspapers and magazines as El Hogar and La Nación. Her work soon gained the admiration of renowned writers such as Pablo Neruda, Jorge Luis Borges and Juan Ramón Jiménez. In 1945, Walsh met Victoria Ocampo, an Argentine intellectual who brought together exiled and local artists and intellectuals, and who had been editing the famous magazine Sur for more than a decade. This encounter led María Elena Walsh to publish in Sur.
Living in the same Buenos Aires neighbourhood probably facilitated the relationship. Walsh was a native of Ramos Mejía, as was the Argentine photographer Horacio Coppola. Despite her young age, Walsh entered the circle of Victoria Ocampo, with whom she had a close friendship for decades, and of Grete Stern, who photographed her on several occasions. In fact, Walsh was a regular at the meetings organised a few streets away from her family home, in the house that the Russian Vladimir Acosta had built for Grete Stern between 1934 and 1939.
María Elena Walsh died at the age of 80, in 2011, but continues to fill Argentine homes with her songs and stories for children.