Demetrio Aguilera Malta
| Demetrio Aguilera Malta | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born | may 24, 1909 Guayaquil, Ecuador |
| Died | 28 December 1981 (aged 72) Mexico City, Mexico |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Nationality | Ecuadorian |
| Genre | Social Realism, Magical Realism |
| Notable works | Seven Serpents and Seven Moons |
Demetrio Aguilera Malta (Guayaquil, May 24, 1909 – México D.F., December 28, 1981) was an Ecuadorian writer, director, painter, and diplomat. He was a member of the Guayaquil Group of the 1930s, who used social realism in their writings. He used magical realism in his masterpiece Siete lunas y siete serpientes (1970), which was translated into English as the Seven Serpents and Seven Moons by Gregory Rabassa in 1979.
Aguilera Malta was born on May 24, 1909 in Guayaquil, Ecuador. He was the son of Demetrio Aguilera Sánchez and Teresa Malta y Franco. His father officially named him Demetrio Abdon but his mother hated the name Abdon and called him always Raúl Demetrio. He stopped using Raúl on the advice of Joaquín Gallegos Lara. His father was a businessman who owned factories and farms. His maternal great-grandfather, Juan José de Malta y Salcedo, was a playwright, and the young Aguilera Malta discovered his works in the library he inherited from his grandfather. Aguilera Malta spent much of his childhood on his family's farm on an island in the Gulf of Guayaquil. He was home-schooled by his mother and tutors. He went to high school at Vicente Rocafuerte School, from which he graduated in 1929. José de la Cuadra was his literature teacher. At the beginning of his college education, he studied law in Guayaquil, but he quit these studies in 1931. Later, he studied literature on a Ministry of Education scholarship in Ecuador and in Madrid, just before the start of the Spanish Civil War.
Among other posts, Aguilera Malta was Undersecretary of Education and charge d'affaires in the Ecuadorian Embassy in Chile in 1947 under the government of Carlos Julio Arosemena Tola. Later, he was Cultural Attache in Brazil in 1949 and Ambassador of Ecuador to Mexico from August 1979 until his death in 1982.
He held conferences and courses at several universities in North and South America, including Claremont Colleges and the University of California, Irvine.
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