Chilean writer and diplomat Jorge Edwards has died at the age of 91
The 1999 Cervantes Prize winner died on Friday March 17 in Madrid at the age of 91.
George Edwards in 2012.
AFP
Chilean writer Jorge Edwards, winner of the 1999 Cervantes Prize and author of the bestseller “Persona non grata,” which chronicled his displeasure with the Cuban revolution, died on Friday in Madrid at the age of 91, his son told AFP. “An exceptional novelist, courageous columnist and a journalist who knew all the layers of current events. We will miss his life and moral stature,” the Cervantes Institute wrote on Twitter.
Born in Santiago in 1931, Jorge Edwards studied law at the University of Chile and did postgraduate studies at Princeton University in the United States. He worked in Chilean diplomacy from 1957 to 1973 until Augusto Pinochet’s military coup (1973-1990), working in Paris, Lima and a mission that particularly marks him: Havana.
A friend of the poet Pablo Neruda
George Edwards spent three months in 1971 opening the Chilean embassy in the Cuban capital on behalf of the socialist government of Salvador Allende (1970–73), the first to restore diplomatic relations with the regime of Fidel Castro. His dual role as diplomat and writer allows him to interact with writers on the island. George Edwards was not officially expelled, but he left Cuba earlier than planned for Paris, where he reunited with his friend Pablo Neruda, then ambassador to France.
From this period in Cuba, he learned to “distinguish between appearances, outward gestures, ritual speech and reality,” he admitted in 2018. In 1973 he moved to Barcelona, where he interacted with other Latin American writers in residence. Colombian Gabriel García Márquez and Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa. Appointed UNESCO ambassador in Paris in 1994, he received the Cervantes Prize five years later.
He served his last post as Ambassador at the Chilean Embassy in Paris from 2010 to 2014, during the first term of conservative Chilean President Sebastián Piñera. George Edwards wrote many novels, short stories, essays and autobiographical works. He has collaborated with European and Latin American media such as Le Monde in France, El Pais in Spain, Il Corriere della Sera in Italy, Argentine newspapers La Nacion and Clarin, and Mexican magazine Letras Libres.
AFP
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