Madrid (EFE).- The Spanish-Chilean Jorge Edwards, 1999 Cervantes Prize winner, died this Friday in Madrid at the age of 92.
Writer and journalist, he was an academic of Language in Chile and a corresponding member of the Royal Spanish Academy. He combined literature with regular collaborations in Chilean and international newspapers and conferences and courses at American universities.
Born on July 29, 1931 in Santiago de Chile, he trained with the Jesuits and later graduated in Law and studied in the US, at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, at Princeton University.
Edwards mixed his literary career with politics and diplomacy, which he joined in the mid-fifties and from which he was expelled by the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990), which forced him into exile in Barcelona between 1973 and 1978.
His diplomatic career
In his diplomatic career he held different positions: he was a counselor in Lima and secretary of the Chilean embassy in Paris (when the poet Pablo Neruda was ambassador) and, in 2010, he held the position of Chilean ambassador in the French capital.
He was also head of the Eastern Europe department of the Chilean Foreign Ministry, took part in the Latin American common market project and served in the sixties for a few months as ambassador to Cuba, where he ended up being declared “persona non grata” by the island’s government. for his support of dissident writers.
Although he wrote his first book of short stories at the age of 20, diplomacy and politics absorbed him for a long time.
In 1974 he published “Persona non grata”, about his experiences in Cuba, which was censored in Chile and on the island. This work was republished in 2006 with a new epilogue, entitled “The double censorship.”
A prolific writer, he was the author of books such as “Gente de la ciudad” (1961); “The weight of the night” (1964); “From the dragon’s tail”, with which he won the World Essay Award in Spain (1977); “The stone guests” (1978), about the Chilean exile; “The wax museum” (1982); or “The imaginary woman” (1989).
Other titles of his were “Uncomfortable Memory” (1991); “Adiós poeta” (1991), Comillas Award for Biography; and “The origin of the world” (1996).
Latest novels by Jorge Edwards
His latest novels include: “The dream of history” (2000), “The useless family” (2005), “The house of Dostoyevsky” (2008), “The death of Montaigne” (2011), or ” The last sister” (2016).
In July 2015, the writer delivered two letters and three exemplary books of “El Patio”, “People of the city” and “Persona non grata” in the legacy that he deposited in the Caja de las Letras of the Cervantes Institute in Madrid.
Three years ago he published the novel “Oh, evil”, starring a young Pablo Neruda.
On the occasion of his 90th birthday, in an interview with EFE in July 2021 in Santiago de Chile, he indicated that he hoped to return to Cuba where he assured that they would receive him “as if Jesus Christ arrived.”
Jorge Edwards received the Chilean National Literature Prize (1994) or the prestigious Cervantes Prize (1999) in Spain.
Apart from these awards, he won the Silver Pen at the Bilbao Book Fair (2008) for his career, the Planeta-Casamérica Ibero-American Narrative Prize for his novel “La casa de Dostoievsky” (2008), the International Prize for Valladolid Cristóbal Gabarrón de las Letras Foundation (2009), or the González Ruano Prize for Journalism (2011), and in 2016 he was recognized with the Grand Cross of the Order of Alfonso X the Wise.