Enthusiasm and vivid memories seep across with joy from Chicana Artist Margaret Garcia as I sat in her colourful studio in Highland Park, California surrounded by textured paintings and portraits of friends hung on the walls. Her visit... Read Article
As the author of Pablo Neruda’s biography, Pablo Neruda: A Passion for Life and an adviser on Neruda (Pablo Larraín’s recent biographic feature film), we can safely say that Adam Feinstein is an authority on the Chilean poet. However, he’s also a major... Read Article
“We were in a dazzling and secret world of nature which at the same time was a growing menace of cold, snow and persecution.” Pablo Neruda, Nobel Lecture 1971. Few poets have captured the imagination of a continent like... Read Article
“¡Ay, qué manera de caer hacia arriba y de ser sempiterna, esta mujer!” (“Oh, the way this woman has of falling upwards and being eternal!”) These are the opening lines to Pablo Neruda’s poem “Una Elegia para Cantar” (An... Read Article
Pablo Larraín’s latest film, Neruda, captures just over a year of the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s life. Set from 1946-48 it follows a Chilean police inspector on the hunt for the famous poet after he goes into hiding... Read Article
Director Mark Donne’s short documentary covers a 22-year-long battle for legal redress for what Amazon Watch, an independent environmental NGO based in California, describes as “one of the worst environmental disasters on the planet”. The plaintiffs, 30,000 poor... Read Article
“And one by one the nights between our separated cities are joined to the night that unites us.” Pablo Neruda In 1949 my Russian family travelled from Shanghai to Santiago. In 2014 I finally decided to travel to... Read Article
If the Mapuche people are known at all outside Chile, it is as the fierce Araucanian warriors that managed to repel Spanish and Chilean attempts to colonize their homeland until the 1880s. (The terms “Araucanian” and “Mapuche” are... Read Article
La Guerilla Literaria begins on the streets of Geneva in 1992, a couple of years after the fall of the Pinochet dictatorship. Pepe de Rokha, exiled grandson of the volatile Chilean vanguard poet Pablo de Rokha, meets a... Read Article
Story of a Death Foretold (subtitled The Coup against Salvador Allende, 11 September 1973) is an impressive and highly readable account of the fall of Allende and a thorough appraisal of the wider historical, cultural and geo-political threads that... Read Article
In many ways Santiago is a patchwork city. Each commune, or barrio, with its own architecture and atmosphere. The modern chic Providencia and Los Condes, air conditioned shops, boulevards and sky scrapers, filled with those benefiting from the... Read Article
As I write this I’m sitting in a Sao Paulo airport waiting for my flight connection heading home from my time in Santiago. I’ve slept two hours of the last 24. I smell strongly of perfume, after the... Read Article
