Skip to Main Content

Chilean History and Literature

Resources for the history and literature of Chile.

Fiction & Poetry Books by Author:

English books:

Spanish books:

E-Books:

English Books:

Spanish Books:

English E-Books:

Bilingual Book:

Spanish Books:

English Books:

Poets:

Gabriela Mistral, literary pseudonym of Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, was the first Spanish American author to receive the Nobel Prize in literature; as such, she will always be seen as a representative figure in the cultural history of the continent. One of the best-known Latin American poets of her time, Gabriela—as she was admiringly called all over the Hispanic world—embodied in her person, as much as in her works, the cultural values and traditions of a continent that had not been recognized until then with the most prestigious international literary prize. "It is to render homage to the riches of Spanish American literature that we address ourselves today especially to its queen, the poet of Desolación, who has become the great singer of mercy and motherhood," concludes the Nobel Prize citation read by Hjalmar Gullberg at the Nobel ceremony. Mistral's works, both in verse and prose, deal with the basic passion of love as seen in the various relationships of mother and offspring, man and woman, individual and humankind, soul and God.

A dedicated educator and an engaged and committed intellectual, Mistral defended the rights of children, women, and the poor; the freedoms of democracy; and the need for peace in times of social, political, and ideological conflicts, not only in Latin America but in the whole world. She always took the side of those who were mistreated by society: children, women, Native Americans, Jews, war victims, workers, and the poor, and she tried to speak for them through her poetry, her many newspaper articles, her letters, and her talks and actions as Chilean representative in international organizations. Above all, she was concerned about the future of Latin America and its peoples and cultures, particularly those of the native groups. Her altruistic interests and her social concerns had a religious undertone, as they sprang from her profoundly spiritual, Franciscan understanding of the world. Her personal spiritual life was characterized by an untiring, seemingly mystical search for union with divinity and all of creation.

- The Poetry Foundation

Pablo Neruda is one of the most influential and widely read 20th-century poets of the Americas. “No writer of world renown is perhaps so little known to North Americans as Chilean poet Pablo Neruda,” observed New York Times Book Review critic Selden Rodman. Numerous critics have praised Neruda as the greatest poet writing in the Spanish language during his lifetime. John Leonard in the New York Times declared that Neruda “was, I think, one of the great ones, a Whitman of the South.” Among contemporary readers in the United States, he is largely remembered for his odes and love poems.

Born Ricardo Eliezer Neftali Reyes y Basoalto, Neruda adopted the pseudonym under which he would become famous while still in his early teens. He grew up in Temuco in the backwoods of southern Chile. Neruda’s literary development received assistance from unexpected sources. Among his teachers “was the poet Gabriela Mistral who would be a Nobel laureate years before Neruda,” reported Manuel Duran and Margery Safir in Earth Tones: The Poetry of Pablo Neruda. “It is almost inconceivable that two such gifted poets should find each other in such an unlikely spot. Mistral recognized the young Neftali’s talent and encouraged it by giving the boy books and the support he lacked at home.”

- The Poetry Foundation

These four trends correspond to four aspects of Neruda’s personality: his passionate love life; the nightmares and depression he experienced while serving as a consul in Asia; his commitment to a political cause; and his ever-present attention to details of daily life, his love of things made or grown by human hands. Many of his other books, such as Libro de las preguntas (1974; The Book of Questions), reflect philosophical and whimsical questions about the present and future of humanity. Neruda was one of the most original and prolific poets to write in Spanish in the 20th century, but despite the variety of his output as a whole, each of his books has unity of style and purpose.

Neruda’s work is collected in Obras completas (1973; 4th ed. expanded, 3 vol.). Most of his work is available in various English translations. Four essential works are Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, translated by W.S. Merwin (1969, reissued 1993); Residence on Earth, and Other Poems, translated by Angel Flores (1946, reprinted 1976); Canto general, translated by Jack Schmitt (1991); and Elementary Odes of Pablo Neruda, translated by Carlos Lozano (1961). All the Odes (2013) collected Neruda’s odes both in the original Spanish and in English translation. Then Come Back: The Lost Neruda (2016) is a collection (in Spanish and English) of 21 previously unpublished poems discovered in his archives.

- Encyclopedia Brittanica

In recent years, his mistreatment of women has come to light, drawing criticism over his legacy. 

Born in Santiago de Chile in 1975, Zambra is the leading light of a generation of Chilean authors who have encountered both commercial success and critical acclaim, and whose work explores the contested space of the trauma inherited from the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973–1990). Known primarily for his slender yet ornately constructed narratives, Zambra’s first novel BONSÁI was published by Anagrama in 2006 and was quickly followed by THE PRIVATE LIFE OF TREES in 2007. A further novel, WAYS OF GOING HOME, which drew heavily from the author’s childhood, was published in 2011, and in 2013 Zambra published a collection of short stories called MY DOCUMENTS, aptly titled from the folder on his desktop where many of these works had been gestating for years. In addition to these narratives, which are available in English in the masterful translations of Megan McDowell and Carolina de Robertis, Zambra has published two collections of poetry and a quirky tome called MULTIPLE CHOICE that is a kind of narrative poem in the form of a multiple choice aptitude test. As if all this isn’t enough, Zambra taught until recently at the Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago and for many years was a literary critic for LA TERCERA daily newspaper. A collection of his essays, which touch on literature from Uruguay to Germany, Japan to Argentina, and most places in between, has just appeared in English as NOT TO READ, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions. Zambra came up with the title, he said, after years of suffering at the hands of mediocre teachers and lecturers: ‘As far and my friends and I could tell, the entire purpose of the teaching of literature in Chile was to dissuade everyone from the reading and enjoyment of books.’

- Samuel Rutter, The White Review

Avant-garde poet Vicente Huidobro was born to an aristocratic family in Santiago, Chile. He is known as the creator and exponent of the literary movement called Creationism (Creacionismo), which combined aspects of modernism with neo-platonism and the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. After studying literature at the University of Chile, he lived in Paris for about ten years, where he associated with poets and artists such as Pablo Picasso, Guillame Apollinaire, and Pierre Reverdy. Huidobro returned to Chile in the mid-1920s and worked as a newspaper editor, and he ran for the presidency of Chile, ultimately losing the campaign. His most definitive poetic work is Altazor (1931). He died in Cartagena, Chile, at the age of 56.

Translations of Huidobro's work in English include: The Relativity of Spring: 13 poems (translated by Michael Palmer and Geoffrey Young, 1976), The Selected Poetry of Vicente Huidobro (edited by David Guss, 1981), Althazor (translated by Eliot Weinberger, 1988), and The Poet Is a Little God: Creationist Verse (translated by Jorge García-Gómez, 1990).

- The Poetry Foundation

Pablo de Rokha (b. 17 October 1894; d. 10 September 1968), Chilean poet. Born Carlos Díaz Loyola but taking the pen name Pablo de Rokha, this writer is seen by some critics as one of the main figures of the Chilean avant-garde. He had a tempestuous personality that put him in frequent conflict with Vicente Huidobro and Pablo Neruda (Neruda y yo [1955]). Rokha's poetic voice was one of ideological and socialist bias; his inordinate epic tone encompassed both the revolutionary facts and figures of world history and the daily life of the local peasant. [...] A Marxist, Rokha never accepted the party discipline or espoused any official party line. His [large] number of works include Los quemidos (1922), Escritura de Raimondo Contreras (1929), Jesucristo (1933), Gran temperatura (1937), Morfología del espanto (1942), Canto al ejército rojo (1944), Fuego negro (1953), and Canto de fuego a China Popular (1963). In 1965 he received the National Literary Award. Two years later, [he passed tragically from suicide.]

- Encyclopedia.com

 

Prose Authors:

Isabelle Allende (born August 2, 1942, Lima, Peru), [is a] Chilean American writer in the magic realist tradition who is considered one of the first successful women novelists from Latin America.

Allende was born in Peru to Chilean parents. She worked as a journalist in Chile until she was forced to flee to Venezuela after the assassination (1973) of Chilean Pres. Salvador Allende, her father’s cousin. In 1981 she began writing a letter to her terminally ill grandfather that evolved into her first novel, La casa de los espíritus (1982; The House of the Spirits; film 1993). It was followed by the novels De Amor y de Sombra (1984; Of Love and Shadows; film 1994), Eva Luna (1987), and El plan infinito (1991; The Infinite Plan) and the collection of stories Cuentos de Eva Luna (1990; The Stories of Eva Luna). All are examples of magic realism, in which realistic fiction is overlaid with elements of fantasy and myth. Her concern in many of these works is the portrayal of South American politics, and her first four works reflect her own experiences and examine the role of women in Latin America. The Infinite Plan, however, is set in the United States, and its protagonist is male.

Allende followed those works of fiction with the novels Hija de la fortuna (1999; Daughter of Fortune), about a Chilean woman who leaves her country for the California gold rush of 1848–49, and Retrato en sepia (2000; Portrait in Sepia), about a woman tracing the roots of her past. El Zorro (2005; Zorro) is a retelling of the well-known legend, and Inés del alma mía (2006; Inés of My Soul; TV miniseries 2020) tells the fictionalized story of Inés Suárez, the mistress of conquistador Pedro de Valdivia. La isla bajo el mar (2009; The Island Beneath the Sea) uses the 1791 slave revolt in Haiti as a backdrop for a story about a mulatto slave who is forced to become her owner’s lover after his wife goes mad. El cuaderno de Maya (2011; Maya’s Notebook) takes the form of a teenage girl’s diary, written in the wake of a disastrous episode of drug use and prostitution. In El juego de Ripper (2014; Ripper), Allende tells the story of a teenage girl tracking a serial killer. Her later novels include El amante japonés (2015; The Japanese Lover), which traces a decades-long love affair between a Polish immigrant and a Japanese American man, and Más allá del invierno (2017; In the Midst of Winter), about the friendships that form after a car accident in Brooklyn, New York, during a blizzard. In Largo pétalo de mar (2019; A Long Petal of the Sea), a man and a woman become exiles following the Spanish Civil War and flee to Chile aboard a refugee ship chartered by poet Pablo Neruda. Allende’s next novel, Violeta (2022), centres on a 100-year-old South American woman who looks back on her eventful life. 

Allende’s first nonfiction work, Paula (1994), was written as a letter to her daughter, who died of a hereditary blood disease in 1992. A more lighthearted book, Afrodita: cuentos, recetas, y otros afrodisíacos (1997; Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses), shared her personal knowledge of aphrodisiacs and includes family recipes. Mi país inventado (2003; My Invented Country) recounted her self-imposed exile after the September 11, 1973, revolution in Chile and her feelings about her adopted country, the United States—where she has lived since the early 1990s—after the September 11 attacks of 2001. Her later memoirs include La suma de los dias (2007; The Sum of Our Days), about her extended family, and The Soul of a Woman (2021), in which she discussed her development as a feminist.

In 1996 Allende used the profits from Paula to fund the Isabel Allende Foundation, which supports nonprofit organizations targeting issues faced by women and girls in Chile and the San Francisco Bay area. She was awarded the Premio Nacional de Literatura (Chilean National Prize in Literature) in 2010, the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014, and the PEN Center USA’s lifetime achievement award in 2016.

- Encyclopedia Brittanica

Roberto Bolaño, in full Roberto Bolaño Ávalos, (born April 28, 1953, Santiago, Chile—died July 15, 2003, Barcelona, Spain), Chilean author who was one of the leading South American literary figures at the turn of the 21st century.

Bolaño’s literary career began when he published a poetry collection while living in Mexico. In 1977 he left Mexico to travel the world and eventually settled in Spain, where he married and held a series of low-paying jobs while still working on his craft. He turned to prose after the birth of his son in 1990, believing that fiction would be more remunerative than poetry. After producing a series of short stories, he published the novel La pista de hielo (The Skating Rink) in 1993, which he followed with La literatura nazi en América (1996; Nazi Literature in the Americas) and Estrella distante (1996; Distant Star).

Bolaño’s breakthrough work was Los detectives salvajes (1998; The Savage Detectives), which tells the story of a circle of radical Mexican poets known as the “visceral realists.” The book begins as a diary of a young poet new to the group, but it then telescopes into a chronicle of the adventures of the visceral realists’ two founders on their search through Mexico for an elusive poet and their subsequent globe-trotting, as told from the perspectives of more than 50 narrators. The novel made Bolaño a literary star throughout Latin America and won the prestigious Rómulo Gallegos Prize (the Spanish-language equivalent of the Booker Prize). He continued his frenetic writing pace, publishing at least one new book each year, spurred in large part by a looming awareness of his impending death (he was diagnosed with a chronic liver ailment in 1992). Notable among the last volumes published during his lifetime is Nocturno de Chile (2000; By Night in Chile), the searing deathbed rant of a Chilean priest through which Bolaño chastised what he saw as the many failings of his native country, from the Roman Catholic Church to the Pinochet regime. Bolaño died while awaiting a liver transplant in a Barcelona hospital at age 50.

Although he became a well-known and critically hailed author in Spanish-speaking countries following the publication of Los detectives salvajes, Bolaño was not widely translated until after his death. His worldwide literary reputation was made with the posthumous publication of his magnum opus, 2666 (2004). That massive novel is divided into five loosely connected sections, which Bolaño considered publishing separately. The book’s most-acclaimed section, the fourth, details a series of gruesome murders of young women (loosely based on actual murders that took place in Juárez, Mexico, at the time of the novel’s setting) through a series of sanitized investigative reports, taking the reader on an unflinching exploration of suffering and grief. After the publication of 2666, nearly all of Bolaño’s earlier Spanish writings were translated into English. A number of additional works were posthumously printed, including the short-story collection El secreto del mal (2007; The Secret of Evil), the poetry anthology La universidad desconocida (2007; The Unknown University), and the novels El tercer reich (2010; The Third Reich) and Sinsabores del verdadero policía (2011; Woes of the True Policeman).

- Encyclopedia Brittanica

Marcela Serrano was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1951. In 1994, her first novel won the Literary Prize in Santiago, and her second book won the Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz prize, awarded to the best Hispano-American novel written by a woman. She now teaches at the University of Vicente Perez Rosales in Mexico City.

- Penguin Random House

With four books to her credit, Marcela Serrano is considered one of the foremost writers in a style called the new Chilean narrative. She has won awards for her work in Mexico, France and her native Chile. But unless you speak Spanish or live in Europe (where some of her books have been translated), you've probably never heard of her.

"Antigua and My Life Before" is Serrano's impressive U.S. debut. As with her other novels, this complex work explores feminism and the tortured relationships between men and women. In "Antigua," Serrano touches on these subjects while telling the story of the friendship between Violeta Dasinski and Josefa Ferrer.

- Chicago Tribune

 

José Donoso, (born October 5, 1924, Santiago, Chile—died December 7, 1996, Santiago), Chilean novelist and short-story writer who was important in the development of the Latin American new novel. He used dark surrealism, black comedy, and social satire to explore the lives of decaying aristocrats in a morally disintegrating society.

After studying at the Pedagogical Institute of Santiago for three years, Donoso attended Princeton University, where he received a B.A. degree in 1951. He taught at the Catholic University of Chile and the University of Chile in the 1950s and toward the end of the decade worked as a journalist. After lecturing at the University of Iowa (1965–67), he took up residence in Spain.

Donoso’s first published works were short stories, and his collection Veraneo y otros cuentos (“Summer Vacation and Other Stories”) appeared in 1955. He established his reputation with the debut novel Coronación (1957; Coronation), which won him the William Faulkner Foundation Prize in 1962. It presents the moral collapse of an aristocratic family and suggests that an insidious loss of values affects all sectors of society. Donoso’s second and third novels, Este Domingo (1966; This Sunday) and El lugar sin límites (1966; “The Place Without Limits”; Hell Has No Limits), depict characters barely able to subsist in an atmosphere of desolation and anguish. El obsceno pajaro de la noche (1970; The Obscene Bird of Night), regarded as his masterpiece, presents a hallucinatory, often grotesque, world, and explores the fears, frustrations, dreams, and obsessions of his characters with profound psychological insight. In the novel Casa de campo (1978; A House in the Country), which Donoso considered his best work, he examines in a Surrealist style the breakdown of social order in postcolonial Latin America.

Donoso returned to live in Chile in 1982. The author of numerous antigovernment articles, he was briefly detained in 1985 after he protested the dismissal of dissident writers from their teaching positions. His other works include El jardín de al lado (1981; The Garden Next Door), La desesperanza (1986; “Hopelessness”; Eng. trans. Curfew), and Taratuta: naturaleza muerta con cachimba (1990; Taratuta, and Still Life with Pipe).

- Encyclopedia Brittanica

Mr. Sepúlveda published several novels, children’s stories and travel books, and he also wrote and directed films. He acquired fame with his novel “The Old Man Who Read Love Stories” (1988), which tells the story of a man who, together with his wife, leaves his mountain village to take part in the colonization of the Amazon. The book was inspired by Mr. Sepúlveda’s stay in the 1970s with the region’s Shuar Indigenous people. A review in The New York Times by David Unger compared it to one of the early works of Gabriel García Márquez. “In its simple language and philosophical underpinnings, it is magical, thanks to the author’s skill at describing jungle life,” Mr. Unger wrote. Mr. Sepúlveda wrote the screenplay for a 2001 movie version starring Richard Dreyfuss.

Mr. Sepúlveda was born on Oct. 4, 1949, in Ovalle, a small city in central Chile. His father owned a restaurant and was a Communist militant. His mother, who was of Mapuche Indigenous descent, worked as a nurse. As a teenager, he joined the Communist Youth and then studied theater at the University of Chile. After Gen. Pinochet staged a coup and took charge of Chile in 1973, Mr. Sepúlveda was among a large number of left-wing intellectuals and political activists jailed by the regime.

His prison sentence was eventually turned into house arrest. He fled and went underground, but was recaptured and sentenced again, this time to 28 years in prison. With support from Amnesty International, his sentence was eventually changed to exile and he spent some time in the Amazon. In the late 1970s, Mr. Sepúlveda moved around Latin America including Nicaragua, where he joined a leftist militant group. He lived for a time in Germany, where he worked for Greenpeace, serving on one of its ships. In 1997, he settled in Spain’s northern region of Asturias, where he renewed his relationship with Carmen Yáñez, a poet whom he had married in Chile before the coup. Ms. Yáñez had been detained and tortured by Pinochet’s police, but she eventually was granted political asylum in Sweden, where she lived until she rejoined Mr. Sepúlveda in Spain. She and five children, Carlos, Paulina, Max, Leon and Sebastián, survive him.

- "Luis Sepúlveda, Chilean Writer Exiled by Pinochet, Dies at 70," The New York Times, 2020.