Diamela Eltit

Diamela Eltit (born 1947, Santiago de Chile) is a well known chilean writer and university professor. Between 1966 and 1976 she graduated in spanish studies at the Universidad Católica de Chile and followed graduate studies in Literature at the Universidad de Chile in Santiago. In 1977 she began a career as spanish and literature teacher at high school level in several public schools in Santiago, such as the Instituto Nacional and the Liceo Carmela Carvajal. In 1984 she started teaching at universities in Chile, where she is currently professor at the Universidad Tecnológica Metropolitana and abroad. During the last thirty years Eltit has lectured and participated in conferences, seminars and literature events throughout the world, in Europe, Africa, North and Latin America. She has been several times visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and also at Johns Hopkins University, Stanford University, Washington University at Saint Louis, University of Pittsburgh, University of Virginia and, since 2007, New York University, where she holds a teaching appointment as Distinguished Global Visiting Professor and teaches at the Creative Writing Program in Spanish. In the academic year 2014-2015 Eltit was invited by Cambridge University, U.K., to the Simon Bolivar Chair at the Center of Latin American Studies. Since 2014 Diamela Eltit´s personal and literary archives are deposited at the University of Princeton. Through her career several hundreds of latin american young writers have participated as students at her highly appreciated literature workshops.

In 1973, after the military coup, Eltit decided to stay in Chile. during this period she started publishing her first manuscripts. When democracy returned in 1990 she was culture attaché at the Chilean Embassy in Mexico till 1994. During several periods she has been representative of the Council of Chilean Universities to the Book National Council, where policies with regard to book publishing and reading practices are defined and promoted. She has written for many journals and newspaper. Most recently she collaborated for several year in The Clinic and now she writes opinions por El Desconcierto, both in Santiago.

In 1979 Eltit created together with the poet Raúl Zurita, the visual artists Lotty Rosenfeld and Juan Castillo and the sociologist Fernando Balcells the Colectivo de Acciones de Arte (CADA), a vanguard group part of the so called Escena de Avanzada. CADA struggled for reformulating artistic circuits under the Pinochet dictatorship.

En 1980 Eltit published her first book, Una milla de cruces sobre el paviment, a volume of essays. Her first novel, Lumpérica, appeared in 1983 in Ediciones del Ornitorrinco, a small editorial house from Santiago. The text dedicated to Eltit in the internet cultural portal Memoria Chilena, explains that 1980 decade was specially complicated for the chilean intelectuals that had to elaborate strategies to publish and circulate their work in a cultural environment where censorship existed. In this context, women publications were a significant contribution because they generated renewed spaces of thinking on political issues and subjects as sexuality, authoritarianism, domestic life and gender identity. Eltit was part of this new generation and not only articulated an original literary project —a theoretical, esthetic, social and political proposal with a new reading space as perspective—, but also developed a visual work as a member of CADA".

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