The Inca people did not know writing, but this was no obstacle to develop a Quechua-language literature in genres such as epic, dramatic and lyrical.
A tiny part of this cultural heritage has been preserved until today because they did collections chroniclers. This is especially poetry as haylli that hymns were a kind of warriors, or harawi, which, however, were songs of love and absence.
During the first centuries of the colony, the genre most characteristic was the chronicle. Among the writers who were born in Cusco or created their work in the ancient Inca capital include Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, with his "Royal Commentaries of the Incas" (1609), Basque Contreras and Valverde, with his "Relation of Cuzco City "(1649), Diego de Esquivel y Navia, author of" News Timeline Cuzco City "(1749), and finally, Ignacio de Castro, who wrote a" Relation of the Foundation of the Royal Court Cuzco "(1788). A man of letters who also achieved renown in his time and is considered up to now one of the pillars of colonial Peruvian literature was Juan Espinoza Medrano, "The spotted rose", author of "Apology for Luis de Gongora" (1662 ), of great masters of style.
The Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (1540-1616) is, however, who reaches universal stature. For many incarnation of the mixing that occurs in Peruvian soil after the Spanish conquest. Garcilaso is primarily the author of this mixture of historical chronicle, literature and autobiography are "Royal Commentaries of the Incas", a book written in full intellectual maturity and in which the Inca makes a reconstruction of life in the empire Inca reliable but not always full, instead of the admiration that the Incas have for that period in its history.
Another interesting point of literature is related to colonial Cuzco Quechua and is produced from the late seventeenth century. By then, the seeds of nationalism in Creole sectors makes it begins to produce a literature in the native language that seeks to seize the Inca past. Such is the case, to cite only the most representative examples of the tragedies in Quechua and Ollantay Pauca USCAR. In fact, some scholars believe that the period from the late seventeenth century to the late eighteenth century, is the "golden age" of Quechua literature.
Republican Cusco literature is marked by the concern that the artists feel about the situation of prostration in which live the Indian masses as well as by the desire to revalue and reclaim more diverse cultural expressions of this sector by then the majority of the population. In the narrative, this resulted in the emergence of indigenous novel whose first symptoms are found in the nineteenth century. Narciso Aréstegui (1824-1869) and Clorinda Matto de Turner are its greatest exponents.
Lawyer, professor and political Cusco, Aréstegui is the author of "Father Horan", a novel which portrays the life of Cusco in the first half of the nineteenth and makes a strong denunciation of the poverty of the majority of its inhabitants, including Indians. Clorinda Matto de Turner (1852-1909), is the author of which is considered the first novel's indigenous Peru. "Birds without a nest", which shows the cruel exploitation of the victims were Indians. Among his extensive literary production are also some "Cuzco traditions" that, in the style of the "Peruvian Traditions" by Ricardo Palma, Relevant extracts from the history of the ancient Inca capital and curious facts that occurred in it,
Between the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first two of the twentieth century, the city of Cusco called the rise of a wide and varied theatrical production in Quechua. They are more than seventy, including dramas and comedies, the works that were written and staged during this period and many are also authors who cultivated these literary genres, highlighting the names of Nicanor Jara, Jose Zuniga Lucas Nemesio Caparo Cazorla.
In the twentieth century, is almost essential to keep in mind that we might call the "literary mythology" of Cusco, which mainly shows the image of a holy city, home of the highest civilization that flourished on Peruvian soil even before the arrival of Europeans. Precisely in this perspective are pioneering some pages of these pillars of Cuzco indigenismo are Luis E. Valcárcel and Jose Uriel Garcia.
Valcárcel, with his book "The ayllu the empire" (1925), opens the way to exalt the greatness of the ancient capital of the empire that trial mixes poetic prose and has since grown relentlessly in Cusco. Another book published in 1925, "From Inkaiko life," "Some deposits of the spirit that animated" is in the same line. José Uriel García (1884-1965), Valcárcel classmate and, like him, polemical essayist, writer and historian, is the author of "The New Indian" (1930), which makes a sharp analysis of miscegenation and acculturation in Peruvian society.
Poetry is the preferred genre for generations of writers from Cusco along the twentieth century, but are especially two that stand out and whose work trsciende local frameworks, Luis Nieto Miranda (1911-1997) and Andrew Alencastre (1911 - 83), the first, an exponent of "cholismo" an aspect of poetry revalues Peruvian cultural expressions of meztizos or "cholos" and the second, the largest farmer in Peru Quechua-language poetry.
Figure impescindible is also the father of George A. Lira, whose contribution to the rescue of Quechua oral literature, both in the slope poéticacomo in the narrative, is extremely valuable. "Song of Love" and "Tutupaka llaqta" are some titles that corroborate what has just been said. Moreover, speaking of oral tradition, it is fair to remind one of the main informants Lira father, Doña Carmen Taripha, in whose person in some ways embodies the creative genius of the Quechua people.
In recent years, three tellers Cusco in his work portrays both contemporary urban Cusco as rural or explore the history of the Inca capital, have received national recognition. They are Paravicino Enrique Rosas, Luis Nieto and Mario Guevara Degregori Paredes.

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