Jorge Edwards

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Edwards at the Moscow Cervantes Institute. October 11, 2012

Jorge Edwards Valdés (born June 29, 1931) is a Chilean novelist, journalist and diplomat. He is currently the Chilean ambassador to France.

Life and career

Jorge Edwards is a Chilean novelist and journalist. Edwards attended Law School at the Universidad de Chile.

During the presidency of Salvador Allende, Edwards reopened the Chilean embassy in Havana, Cuba, but only three months later, the government of Fidel Castro declared him persona non grata. From this episode he wrote, perhaps, his most famous work, Persona non grata (1971).

In June 1994, Edwards accepted the post of Ambassador for Chile before the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which has its headquarters in Paris, a city where Edwards resided for many years.[2] Edwards currently lives in Santiago de Chile.

In 2008 his novel La Casa de Dostoievsky won the prestigious Premio Iberoamericano Planeta-Casa de América de Narrativa, one of the richest literary prizes in the world, worth $200,000.

In 2010 Edwards was granted Spanish citizenship by King Juan Carlos.

Awards and honors

• 1979 He entered the Academia Chilena de la Lengua
• 1994 Chilean National Prize for Literature
• 1999 Cervantes Prize
• 2000 Orden al mérito de Gabriela Mistral
• 2008 Premio Iberoamericano Planeta-Casa de América de Narrativa

Bibliography

Short stories

• El patio (1962)
• Gente de la ciudad (1961)
• Las máscaras (1967)
• Temas y variaciones (1969)
• Fantasmas de carne y hueso (1993)

Novels

• El peso de la noche (1965)
• Persona non grata (1973)
• Los convidados de piedra (1978)
• El museo de cera (1981)
• La mujer imaginaria (1985)
• El anfitrión (1987)
• El origen del mundo (1996)
• El sueño de la historia (2000)
• El inútil de la familia (2004), about Joaquín Edwards Bello.
• La Casa de Dostoievsky (2008)

Journalism

Jorge Edwards writes for several newspapers in Chile and Latin America (La Nación, Buenos Aires) and Europe (Le Monde, Paris; and El País, Madrid). A large portion of his journalistic work has been collected in two books:

• El whisky de los poetas (1997)
• Diálogos en un tejado (2003)

Other works

He has also written essays and biographies:

• Desde la cola del dragón (1973)
• Adiós, poeta (about Pablo Neruda, 1990)
• Machado de Assís (about the Brazilian writer Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, 2002)

Teaching

Jorge Edwards taught a course at the University of Chicago during the autumn quarter of 2008. The course was entitled My personal history of the boom.[3]

See also

• Edwards family

External links

• Jorge Edwards in the Biblioteca Virtual Cervantes
• Biography of Jorge Edwards in Escritores.cl
• Biography of Jorge Edwards
• Awards and work
• Interview about El inútil de la familia