Jorge Edwards, one of the most prominent names in Chilean literature of the 20th century, passed away this morning in Madrid at the age of 91.
“It was basically diabetes that progressed and produced a state of health that had to be hospitalized over the weekend and then, back home, he died,” said his son Jorge Edwards.
Born in Santiago de Chile in 1931, he studied at the Law School of the University of Chile and did postgraduate studies at Princeton University, in the United States.
He was part of the so-called Generation of the 50s together with writers such as José Donoso, Enrique Lafourcade, Claudio Giaconi, who took American (Walt Whitman, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner) and Russian (León Tolstoy, Fiodor Dostoyevsky) classics as references to build a narrative away from the Creole, the costumbrista and the landscape.
As a writer, he established himself with novels like the weight of the night (1965), the stone guests (1978) The wax museum (1981), The dream of the story (2000), or Dostoevsky’s house (2008).
He was also a diplomat (1957-1973). In 1971, the government of President Salvador Allende sent him on a special mission to Cuba to restore relations, suspended since the early 1960s. His book would come out of this experience. Persona non gratawhere he narrates the details of his stay on the island and his relationships with Cuban writers and artists in the context of the so-called Padilla case.
In 1973, after Augusto Pinochet’s coup d’état, he left the diplomatic service and settled in Barcelona, where he came into contact with writers such as Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa.
In 1994 he was appointed by President Eduardo Frei ambassador to Unesco in Paris. Five years later he was awarded the Cervantes Prize.
“Today a fundamental man of Chilean and Latin American literature is being fired, an intellectual who left his mark and thought on contemporary cultural endeavors,” said the Minister of Culture of Chile, Jaime de Aguirre.
