Chilean writer Antonio Skármeta died at 83

The Chilean writer Antonio Skármeta, known worldwide for the film The postman (and Pablo Neruda), based on one of his novels, he died this Tuesday at the age of 83 after suffering from Alzheimer’s, his son confirmed to the AFP agency.

Indeed, my father passed away this morning. It was a long process that began years ago with Alzheimer’s and ended in a natural death.said Fabián Skármeta.

As a family we are calm. My mother (Nora María Preperski) and I were with him the entire time, accompanying him.he detailed.

Skármeta, narrator and left-wing intellectual, born on November 7, 1940 in Antofagasta, told The Day in 1999: My conception of the world is that of a very fragile, very vulnerable and meaningless space. Faced with the anguish that this implies, the response of my work is to found relationships of love, friendship and creation that relieve and excite what we could call, contradictorily, the joy of our fragility..

loquacious beings

The novelist noted that his characters “are not made for great events. They are rather beings who want to enjoy life, talkative and anxious. They have no calling to be heroes. As in The poet’s wedding y The postman (and Pablo Neruda)“Something great, the great story, comes to knock on your doors, whether through the turbulence of a passion, the discovery of poetry, the right to maintain your freedom.”

Skármeta is an important figure in Latin American literature and many of his texts were made into films, such as Burning patience (1983), The Victory Dance (2009) y The plebiscitewhich inspired the film No (2012), by Pablo Larraín, the first Chilean film nominated for the Oscar for Best Foreign Film.

The writer became known worldwide with Burning patiencewhich tells the relationship of a postman with the Nobel Prize winner Pablo Neruda. The work was taken to the cinema as The postman o The postman (and Pablo Neruda)and received four Oscar nominations.

Skármeta had an intense relationship with Mexico from the beginning of his literary career because, according to the University of Chile, at the beginning in the 60s, when he was a budding writer, he translated books and novels during his time in this country and the United States. Joined.

Since then the narrator’s visit was constant. In the chronicle book Between the pen and the wall (1999), Poli Délano collected the novelist’s links with Mexico.

In 2004, Antonio Skármeta attended the Guadalajara International Book Fair. In 2007 he received a silver medal commemorating Benito Juárez at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and in 2011 the opera premiered here The postmanbased on the film of the same name.

The novelist obtained recognition with the Casa de las Américas awards, the UNESCO award in 2003 and the Planeta award on two occasions. In 2014 he received the National Literature Prize of Chile.

Thank you, teacher, for the life lived. For stories, novels and theater. For political commitmentwrote the president of Chile, Gabriel Boric, in his account on X.

The ruler also thanked him for the cultural television program He show of the books, that expanded the boundaries of literature in the 1990s. Thank you for dreaming that the snow was burning in Chile that hurt you so muchBoric highlighted.

The Senate of the South American nation observed a minute of silence in tribute to the Chilean writer.

The San Sebastián Film Festival published on its social networks the Deepest condolences to the family and friends of Antonio Skármeta.

In a conversation with the writer Elena Poniatowska published in this newspaper, the philosopher also mentioned that with the protagonist of The postman…Mario Jiménez, I wanted to synthesize many virtues of the Chilean people, especially those of the simplest people: their innocence, their naivety, their curiosity, the desire to transcend their own limitations, their creative genius, the humor of their wit, the irony, which is irreverent in the face of to everything pompous.

He then added: “One of the things that moved me the most and that may be at the base of The postman… was once listening to a crowd of people telling Neruda: ‘Poems, poems, we want poems.’ In front of 400 people, poor people who obviously had not eaten, haggard miners, fishermen, farmers, Neruda took out a book and began to read poems to them and the reverence with which they listened to him moved me to the core and I never forgot the scene. I realized that people felt their poets were their spokespersons, and among them the greatest was Pablo Neruda.declared Skármeta.

The author belongs to the so-called generation of the 60s. He studied philosophy at the University of Chile, where years later he worked as a theater director and professor at the Faculty of Philosophy and Education. Skármeta was a member of the Popular and Unitary Action Movement in the years of Popular Unity. After the military coup of 1973, he left the country together with the filmmaker Raúl Ruiz, first to Argentina and then to Germany.

From exile he actively collaborated in denouncing the dictatorship, in actions of solidarity with the victims and in the dissemination of the cultural and artistic experience in exile, an area in which his work in Araucaria from Chileone of the most important magazines on the dissemination of culture and arts of Chileans from exile.

He was the author of a dozen novels, plays and short stories, among which are Enthusiasm, Naked under the roof of a house in Barcelona, ​​The victory dance, I dreamed that the snow was burning, The insurrection, A movie father, Nothing happened y rainbow days.

Our university community regretfully bids farewell to Antonio Skármeta Vraničić, writer, 2014 National Literature Prize, philosophy graduate and academic from the University of Chile in multiple stages of his inspiring career that promoted reading and the love of booksreported the study house on the X platform.

Skármeta will be held at the headquarters of the Chilean National Theater, next to the presidential palace of La Moneda, in the center of Santiago.

(With information from Afp and Prensa Latina)