Ariel Dorfman

Ariel Dorfman is a Chilean-American writer, journalist and human rights activist. He was born in Buenos Aires in 1942 and grew up in Chile. He began teaching at University of Chile, and his first book appeared in 1968. He was on the staff of Chilean President Salvador Allende the day he was removed from office and murdered in the 1973 coup. He was forced into exile and has lived in the United States for many years. He has written a number of novels, plays and essays, both in Spanish and English, mixing his subjects from the horrors of dictatorships to the difficulties of exile. His novels include Blake’s Therapy (2001), The Nanny and the Iceberg (1999), Konfidenz (1995), Hard Rain (1991), The Last Song of Manuel Sendero (1987), and Widows (1983). His play, Death and the Maidem has won several international awards and became a film directed later by Roman Polanski. His most recent books are Other Septembers, Many Americas: Selected Provocations, 1980-2004 (Seven Stories Press, 2004), a book of essays, and In Case of Fire in a Foreign Land (2002), a bilingual book of poetry. Among his non-fiction works are Exorcising Terror: The Incredible Unending Trial of General Augusto Pinochet (2002), Desert Memories: Journeys Through the Chilean North (National Geographic, 2004), which won the Lowell H. Thomas Silver Award for travel writing, The Empire’s Old Clothes: What the Lone Ranger, Babar, and Other Innocent Heroes Do to Our Minds (1983), and his best selling memoir, Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey (1998). He has also made his short film, with his son Rodrigo, My House is on Fire (1997), and has written, with his youngest son, Joaquin, the novel The Burning City (2005). He is distinguished professor of Literature and Latin American Studies at Duke University where he holds the Walter Hines Page Chair. He lives in Durham, North Carolina.