Marianna Guédez Forgiarini
Arcaniam is the alter ego of the Venezuelan author, translator, interpreter, and localizer, Marianna G.F.
Marianna had the fortune to discover her passion from an early age. Although she is originally from Venezuela, she had the opportunity to travel around the world at 10 years old due to her parents needing to finish their PhDs in Europe. This period of abrupt changes in her life began to shape her identity and define the pillars of her personality via her unconditional love for discovering new languages, works of literature, and history by being introduced to various cultures around the world. This little girl found her refuge in her books, always curious about places and stories of the historical past that were never written. All the characters without a name who lost their voices through time. Eventually, that curiosity turned into an obsession, and Marianna started understanding the importance of rescuing the heroes’ adventures without a name today through writing.
After returning to Venezuela at 15 years old, the little girl’s passion was transformed into a career path where she enrolled at the most prestigious university in her country, The University of Los Andes, Merida, when she was 18 years old. Here she graduated with the highest honors in two B.A. “Classic Languages and Literature” and “Hispanic and Venezuelan Language and Literature.” graduating as Valedictorian of her class. In this period of her life, her literary production was especially focused on writing essays about literary criticism that were praised by other scholars in her field, such as the essay entitled “Analysis of tuberculosis as a tragic element in Mefistofele, Juan Rafael Pocaterra’s short story.” A vivid analysis that got her in the pages of the national Venezuelan newspaper “El Nacional.”
Marianna continued her artistic production by writing poems that she recited at different country’s poetry events. However, she got best known as a fictional writer. Her short story entitled “The catalog of the eyes” received the award at the Meeting of Literary Creation held by the University of Los Andes. Marianna continued to venture into other genres. In 2014 she wrote the screenwriting for the micro-telenovela entitled “Siempre fuiste tú” (It was always you) that won the award of the Embassy of the United States in Venezuela. An audiovisual project made in collaboration with her sister, Yuliana G.F, the conceptual photographer.
In 2019, she published her first book, Desde El Exilio, a bilingual collection of poems about the Venezuelan dictatorship in poetic form. Shortly after publishing, her work has received international attention and press. She is currently working as a Translator and Interpreter Lead for the Fortune 10 Company United HealthGroup at Project Fenix, an international project between the U.S. and Latin America.