María Rosa Alonso

María Rosa Alonso Rodríguez was born in Tacoronte on 28 December 1909 and moved with her family to San Cristóbal de La Laguna as a child. The Academia Canaria de la Lengua documents her journalistic collaborations from 1930 under the pseudonym María Luisa Villalba and her move in 1933 to the Universidad Central de Madrid to study Modern Philology.

In 1948 she defended at the University of Madrid the thesis El Poema de Viana: Estudio histórico-literario de un poema épico del siglo XVII, published in 1952. In 1953 she resigned from her teaching post and emigrated to Venezuela; in 1958 she took the chair of Spanish Philology at the Universidad de Los Andes in Mérida.

She received the Canary Islands Prize for Literature in 1987 and was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of La Laguna in 1994. The Academia Canaria de la Lengua places her death in Tenerife in 2011.