Alegría, Ciro

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Ciro Alegría (sē´rō älāgrē´ä), 1909–67, Peruvian novelist. Imprisoned several times for his political activities, Alegría was exiled to Chile in 1934. He gained fame with his novel La serpiente de oro (1935, tr. The Golden Serpent, 1943). In 1941 he won the Latin American Novel Prize for El mundo es ancho y ajeno (tr. Broad and Alien Is the World, 1941), which depicts the exploitation of the Native Americans by the whites.