The Council of Gran Canaria names the writer and journalist Dolores Campos-Herrero Navas adoptive daughter of the island “for her profuse work as a television scriptwriter, playwright, journalist, blogger, cultural activist, and trainer,” which has contributed “to enriching the female literary scene in Canary Islands».
Campos-Herrero was born in the tenerife islandin Abona, Los Cristianos, in 1954. Died in the capital of Gran Canaria in 2007resides during his first years of life in Lanzarotebut it will be in Gran Canaria where he establishes his residence and develops his dense and substantial professional career, in which covers almost all genresleaving its mark on the main media and in the world of culture in the second half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, without forgetting the undoubted impulse to journalism as the women’s literature of the archipelago.
His academic training culminated in the Complutense University of Madrid, with a degree in Information Sciences that he completed with studies in Hispanic Philology and in Archives and Libraries, to return to the round island, where between 1982 and 1987 she joined the first staff of the newspaper Canarias 7 as head of the Culture section.
His career path continued as correspondent for El País in the islands for three years, between 1987 and 1989which he combined with his work on Spanish Television in the Canary Islands, where he also entered from 1987to later form part of the team with which he became head of the Telecanarias news in 2004 and 2005, after going through the writing of cultural spaces such as Tamarco, Paralelo 28, El Patio, as well as Cultura con Ñ.
Tireless
But the work capacity of the tireless Dolores Campos-Herrero was still enough for much more and, thus, signs the scripts for the documentaries Atlantes, from Televisión Española in the Canary Islands and the one from the production company La Sal dedicated to the figure of Trini Borrullall this while collaborating with local newspaper headlines such as Diary of the palmsLa Gaceta de Canarias, or national magazines such as Interviú and Tiempoas well as in Radio programs from Radio Popular and Cadena Española.
Its other great facet, the literary one, shows the tireless lyrics of the new adoptive daughter of Gran Canaria with an enormous work that the Cabildo qualifies as “Enormous and varied, from her stories, through poetry, children’s and youth literature, to the micro-story, of which she was one of its greatest precursors and which she baptized Breverías”.
To this we must add a play, Open your eyes, as well as countless literary articles published, among others, in the magazines Quimera, El Capercaillie, Liminar, LC, Azul, La Fábrica, Cuadernos del Ateneo or La Plazuela de Las Letters.
Campos-Herrero published fifteen books, a first of poetry, in 1985, with the title Chanel Number 5to which three others of the same scope are added: Seven Moons, Other Sundays and News from Paradise.
He dedicated the works Daiquiri and Other Tales to narrative fiction; Basra; Beasts and Angels. A Domestic Bestiary; Deadly Summers; Saints and Sinners; and Eva, Paradise and Other Territories.
Four other volumes of children’s literature, Azalea, awarded in 1995 with the Atlantic for Children’s Literature; Arajelben, Rasaura and The Automata, and The Journey of Almamayé.
fruitful and feisty
Dolores was as fruitful in her literary work as in her struggle to place women in the place of letters that deserves her, and her open criticism of stereotypes anchored in the Pleistocene. In an interview signed by Cecilia Sarleno for the 48th issue of the Cyber Humanitatis magazine of the University of Chile, the author affirms that «the women who write can occupy spaces in the media, have a presence in congresses, publish. However, in the academic territory, in that of prestige that is never discussed, our position is always secondary. We are considered more media than ‘essential’ figures to understand cultural moments. As, on the other hand, if it happens with our male partners. We are read badly and insufficiently. I have seen some literary study in which my work is spoken of in a way that I cannot recognize. It is as if the scholar on duty had settled for randomly reading two stories -and surely not the best- from some book and reducing my work to concepts as vague and diffuse as ‘modern and minimalist’. That is to say, there is a tendency to reduce our work to certain clichés”, to finish off by sensing a somewhat more transparent future, in which “I see that more and more people speak in terms of good and bad literature, than of writers”.
Located in the so-called generation of silence, of the authors of the 80s, although accepted the classification, “as that external circumstance that affected those of us who wanted to put our work out and had nowhere to do it”, and that was shown “very close to what he writes Alexis Ravelo»preferred to bet on the turn of the century: that of “an author”, she pointed out, “of the generation of the 21st century, because it is from 2000 when I have the impression that my work can seem more elaborate, more rigorous, more interesting and rich.”
trail of love
All this baggage, yes, elaborate, rigorous, interesting and rich, is embroidered by a personality whose trail leaves a trail of love and affection on the part of all those who shared both personal and professional space with the new adoptive daughter of Gran Canaria. , for his simplicity and closeness in the deal.
The journalist Juan Cruz, after her death, recalled in El País the last letters of Dolores Campos-Herrero written just five days before her death: «He brought the ladder up to the tree, determined as he was to lower a nest from that cup. He went on and on and passed the height of the entire park and even the level of some clouds. But that had no end. Not the stairs. Nor his desire to go up ».
“As if scratching in childhood, and the end of the future,” Cruz initials.
