Pedro Prado

Pedro Prado (8 October 1886 – 31 January 1952) was a Chilean writer. He won the Chilean National Prize for Literature in 1949.

He was the son of Absalón Prado Marín and Laura Calvo and was born October 8, 1886. His mom died when he was two years old, and his dad passed in 1905. In 1895, he was admitted to the Instituto Nacional General José Miguel Carrera where he studied the humanities until 1903. He also took elective courses in German, accounting, painting, and music. He finished the last two years of his college education at the University of Chile, in the School of Engineering. He then studied at the School of Architecture at the University of Chile for three years without earning a degree. He began exploring his interest in painting at that time, receiving lessons from Pedro Lira, a prominent Chilean artist during the 19th century.

It was around this time that he traveled to northern Chile, then southern Argentina, where he married Adriana Jaramillo Bruce on January 1, 1910. That year he was elected President of the Federation of Students in Chile (FECH) and attended The Congress of Students in Buenos Aires as a delegate. He helped found the Chilean literary group Los Diez in 1914 during one of the most important Chilean intellectual movements of the twentieth century. In 1949 he was awarded the National Prize for Literature.

He began writing poetry with “Flores de cardo”, a book published in 1908, which broke the mold of metric rhyme and marked the introduction of free verse in his country. In 1912, “La casa abandonada” introduced prose poetry, breaking the tradition of versified poetry and founding poetic prose. In 1913, he published “El llamado del mundo”, which was followed in 1915 by the prose poem “Los diez, el claustro, la barca”. That same year, “Los Pájaros Errantes” emerged, which is reputedly his most accomplished lyrical work, utilizing Parnassianism and symbolism. His poetic creations continued with Las Copas in 1921, Karez y Roshan in 1921, and the dramatic poem Androvar in 1925.

He was a deeply philosophical novelist and his work infused creative and poetic imagery with the features of the novels popular within the region at the time. In this genre, he debuted in 1914 with “La reina de Rapa Nui”, an exotic novel where, in the guise of a simple love story, elements of Easter Island folklore are presented. In 1920, he produced his most important and well-known work: “Alsino”, a story with a mythical and philosophically relevant plot, written in prose and full of poetic and symbolic language. It tells the story of a small peasant boy who dreams of emulating Icarus; he leapt from a tree, and as a result of the rough landing, he grew a hump on his back from which wings extended, allowing him to fly just as he desired. The author called it a “romantic poem”. In 1924, he published “Un juez rural”, a realistic-folkloric novel that was, to some extent, autobiographical. It reflected the authors beliefs as to the meaning of justice, the dilemmas of those who manage it, and the extent of its consequences.

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