Luis Sepúlveda Calfucura (October 4, 1949 – April 16, 2020) was a Chilean writer and journalist. He was a communist activist and strong opponent of Augusto Pinochet’s government. During the 1970s, he was imprisoned and tortured by the military government. Sepúlveda wrote many poetry books and short stories. In addition to Spanish, his first language, he also spoke English. He wrote his first novel, El viejo que leía novelas de amor (The Old Man Who Read Love Stories), in English.
Biography
Luis Sepúlveda was born in Ovalle, Limarí Province, Chile, in 1949. His father, José Sepúlveda, was a member of the Chilean Communist Party. His mother, Irma Calfucura, was a nurse with Mapuche heritage. After finishing high school in Santiago, he studied theatre production at the National University of Chile.
He joined the Communist Party at age 12 but was removed from it in 1968. He was politically active as a student leader and worked in the cultural affairs department during the government of Salvador Allende. In this role, he helped produce affordable editions of classic books for the public. He also acted as a mediator between the government and Chilean businesses.
After the 1973 coup that placed General Augusto Pinochet in power, Sepúlveda was imprisoned for two-and-a-half years. He was released early with help from the German branch of Amnesty International and was placed under house arrest. He later escaped and went into hiding for nearly a year. With the help of a friend who led the Alliance française in Valparaíso, he created a drama group that became a center of resistance. He was arrested again and sentenced to life in prison for treason and subversion, later reduced to 28 years.
Amnesty International helped again, and his sentence was changed to eight years of exile. In 1977, he left Chile for Sweden, where he was to teach Spanish literature. He escaped during a stop in Buenos Aires and entered Uruguay. Because of similar political conditions in Argentina and Uruguay, he moved to São Paulo, Brazil, and then to Paraguay. He left Paraguay due to the local government and settled in Quito, Ecuador, as a guest of his friend Jorge Enrique Adoum. There, he directed the Alliance Française theatre, started a theatrical company, and joined a UNESCO mission to study the impact of colonization on the Shuar people.
During the mission, he lived with the Shuar for seven months and learned that the Marxism he had studied was not suitable for rural communities that relied on nature. He worked with Indigenous groups and created the first literacy plan for the Imbabura peasants’ federation in the Andes.
In 1979, he joined the Simón Bolívar International Brigade in Nicaragua. After the revolution, he became a journalist and later moved to Europe. He went to Hamburg, Germany, because he admired German literature, especially the works of Novalis and Friedrich Hölderlin. He worked as a journalist and traveled widely in Latin America and Africa.
In 1982, he worked with Greenpeace on one of their ships until 1987. He later coordinated between Greenpeace branches. His environmental activism continued, especially in Patagonia, which inspired some of his most famous books.
In 1988, he won the Tigre Juan Award for his novel Un viejo que leía novelas de amor. In 2009, he won the Premio Primavera de Novela for La sombra de lo que fuimos. He wrote novels, children’s books, and travel guides. He was also a film writer and director.
On March 1, 2020, after returning from a conference in Portugal, he was confirmed as the first person in the Asturias region of Spain infected with COVID-19. By March 11, he was in critical condition, in an induced coma with assisted breathing due to multiple organ failure in an Oviedo hospital. He died on April 16 from the virus.
Sepúlveda had six children, one daughter and five sons, three of whom were born during his time in Hamburg. At the time of his death, he was married to the Chilean poet Carmen Yáñez. They married in 1968, separated in 1971, reunited in 1997, and remarried in 2004. She wrote a book about their life together titled Un amore fuori dal tempo – La mia vita con Lucho.
Critical reception
Sepúlveda's writing has been studied for its role in discussing environmental problems in Latin America. Laura Barbas-Rhoden says that The Old Man Who Read Love Stories criticizes modernization plans that harm the environment. Scott M. DeVries notes that parts of The Old Man Who Read Love Stories show an environmentalist viewpoint from the perspective of the Spanish American novela de la selva. Jonathan Tittler compares the environmental ideas and story structure of The Old Man Who Read Love Stories with Mario Vargas Llosa's The Storyteller. Juan Gabriel Araya Grandón describes Sepúlveda's 1994 novel Mundo del fin del mundo (World at the End of the World) as a story that focuses on the environment and highlights the conflict between protecting nature and taking resources from it. Adrian Taylor Kane argues that The Old Man Who Read Love Stories and World at the End of the World challenge the European idea of modernity presented by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento in his 1845 work Civilización y barbarie o vida de Juan Facundo Quiroga by turning Sarmiento's ideas about civilization and barbarism upside down.