3. Analysis of the profile in Leila Guerriero’s work

3.1. Biography

Leila Guerriero was born in 1967 in the city of Junín in the Buenos Aires province. She graduated with a degree in Tourism form the University of Junín, even though she never worked in that industry, as well as Humanities at the University of Buenos Aires. In 1992, she left a story entitled Kilómetro cero (Kilometre Zero) at the reception desk of the Argentinean newspaper Página/12, which has a cultural supplement, Página/30 (coordinated by the writer Rodrigo Fresán) that is used to publish readers’ stories. This time they not only published Guerriero’s story, but also hired her. Her first assignment was a report on the traffic chaos in Buenos Aires. From that first report until now, Guerriero has published articles in countless Argentinian and Latin American newspapers and journals. Guerriero is a self-taught journalist who has never studied in a journalism faculty nor in a journalism academy.

Guerriero is currently the editor of the Southern Region for the journals Gatopardo and Travesías, in addition to being director of the collection entitled the Mirada crónica (Chronicle observer), from the publishing house Tusquets Argentina, and since 2016 she has been in charge of the Journalism Specialisation of the Tomás Eloy Martínez Foundation (Buenos Aires). In addition, she also concurrently publishes articles in media outlets throughout the Spanish-speaking world: La Nación and Rolling Stone of Argentina; El País and Vanity Fair of Spain; El Malpensante and Soho of Colombia; Etiqueta Negra of Peru; Milenio, Letras Libres, Gatopardo and Travesías of Mexico; Paula, El Mercurio and Las Ultimas noticias of Chile; El País of Uruguay; Granta of the United Kingdom; and others. Furthermore, Leila Guerriero has received countless journalistic awards: in 2010, her text entitled, El rastro en los huesos (Vestiges on the bones), published in El País Semanal and Gatopardo, received the CEMEX+FNPI award.

In 2013, Guerriero won the González Ruano journalism award from the Mapfre Foundation for her text entitled, El bovarismo, dos mujeres y un pueblo de la Pampa (Bovarism, two women and a town in the Pampas), published in the Colombian journal El Malpensante (2012). In 2014, she was awarded the Konex Prize. Finally, in 2019 she was lauded the 14th Manuel Vázquez Montalbán International Journalism Prize.

3.2. The style of Leila Guerriero

Leila Guerriero’s style in her profiles has now become a highly regarded feature. In order to examine her style, we have employed the categories of the French literary theorist Gérard Genette, who proposes an analysis of the text in relation to the problems of the story: temporary distortions of order, duration, frequency, mode and voice.

In his work entitled Figures III, published in 1972 (1989), Genette states that the story describes the succession of events, whether real or fictitious, that are the object of the narrative discourse and its various relationships of concatenation, opposition, repetition, etc. In order to analyse narrative discourse, Genette explains that the analysis involves “the study of the relations, on the one hand, between this discourse and the events it relates, and on the other hand, between this discourse itself and the act that produces it, whether real... or fictitious”(1989: 81-87).

Genette defines the problems of storytelling (1989: 81-87) as problems related to the following: