Raúl Zurita

Raúl Zurita
at the Biblioteca Nacional de Santiago, 25 April 2013
Born	1950 Santiago de Chile
Language	Spanish
Nationality	Chile
Education	Federico Santa María Technical University
Genre	Poetry
Notable awards	Chilean National Prize for Literature

Raúl Zurita Canessa (born 1950) is a Chilean poet. He won the Chilean National Prize for Literature in 2000.

Raúl Zurita was born in Santiago de Chile in 1950, where he spent his childhood and school years. In 1967 he began his studies of Civil Engineering at the Federico Santa María Technical University in Valparaiso as well as Mathematics at the School of Technical Engineering in Santiago. When on 11 September 1973, Chile’s socialist’s government was overthrown by a military coup, Raúl Zurita was arrested and detained with almost one thousand others in the hold of a ship; a traumatic experience for the then 22-year-old. At that time he got married with Myriam Martínez and had three children. Zurita spent four years earning his living as a computer salesman during a period of financial hardship. At the same time he was a guest reader at the Faculty of Philosophy at the Universidad de Chile in Santiago, where he met writers and intellectuals such as Nicanor Parra, Ronald Kay, Christian Hunneus and Enrique Lihn. The first of his poems to be published appeared in 1975 in “Manuscritos”, the Philosophy Faculty’s publication. Four years later “Purgatorio” was published, the first part of a poetic trilogy which Zurita would not conclude for another fourteen years. The book became a huge success. Together with friends Raúl Zurita founded the artists action group “Colectivo de Acción de Arte”, CADA, in protest against the Pinochet government, but despair in the face of the dictatorship’s regime of terror gradually took hold. No longer wanting to witness the pain surrounding him, he attempted to burn his eyes with ammonium acid but fortunately failed. He got married with his second wife and together had his fourth child.

In 1982, the second part of Zurita’s poetic trilogy entitled “Anteparaiso” was published. Completion of this book went hand in hand with the project to have 15 verses of the poem written by five aeroplanes in eight-kilometre high letters across the sky over New York. These verses which Zurita had written to draw attention to the minorities of the world could be seen throughout large parts of New York.