Photo: La Tercera
Diamela Eltit is a Chilean writer and scholar who earned her postgraduate degree at the Universidad de Chile. For more than thirty years she has taught, attended forums, and has participated in seminars and conferences in diverse universities in Chile, Latin America, the United States, and Europe. She began her teaching career as an Associate Professor at the Technologic University in Santiago, Chile. She has been a Global Distinguished Professor at New York University since 2008, and in 2014-15 she was invited for the Simón Bolívar Cathedra in Cambridge University, U.K. In 2010 she was awarded the José Donoso Latin American Literature prize.
Eltit published her first novel, Lumpérica, in 1983 and has been publishing in Chile, Argentina, Venezuela, Peru, and Mexico ever since. Her work has been translated into English, French, Italian, Finnish, and Greek. Her editorial essays on culture, literature, and politics have been collected in three books. Her writing has been the object of a number of analyses, books, essays,and seminars. An archive of her writings was also acquired by Princeton University’s library.
Eltit was one of the founders of the Collective for Artistic Action (Colección de Acciones de Arte), formed in 1979 and conceived of as an expression of cultural resistance against Pinochet’s dictatorship. The Collective’s archive was donated to the Chilean Museum of Memory and Human Rights.