Life
Diamela Eltit graduated from college from Universidad Católica de Chile and pursued graduate studies in Literature at the Universidad de Chile in Santiago.
In 1977, she began a teaching career in public high schools in Santiago, including Instituto Nacional and Liceo Carmela Carvajal. In 1984, she started teaching at universities in Chile, where she is currently professor at the Universidad Tecnológica Metropolitana and abroad.
She has been held visiting professorships at the University of California at Berkeley, Johns Hopkins University, Stanford University, Washington University in St. Louis, and University of Pittsburgh, University of Virginia. Since 2007, New York University, she has been a distinguished global visiting professor and teaches at the Creative Writing Program in Spanish.[2] Eltit was the 2014–2015 Simon Bolivar Chair at the Center of Latin American Studies at Cambridge.[3]
In 2013 Princeton University acquired her archive, which includes manuscripts, letters, and photographs.[3]
In 1973, after the military coup in Chile,[4] she started publishing her writings. When democracy returned in 1990 she became a cultural attaché at the Chilean Embassy in Mexico until 1994. She was a representative of the Council of Chilean Universities to the Book National Council. 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.[3]
In 1980, Eltit published her first book, Una milla de cruces sobre el pavimento, a volume of essays. Her first novel, Lumpérica, appeared in 1983[2] in Ediciones del Ornitorrinco, a small editorial from Santiago. The text dedicated to Eltit in the internet cultural portal Memoria Chilena, explains that 1980s was complicated for the Chilean intellectuals 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".
Several of Eltit’s novels have been staged by different theater groups and translated into other languages. In 2012 the Spanish editorial house Periférica reached an agreement with Diamela Eltit to republish all her novels.[5]
Three of Eltit novels were chosen as part of the list selected in 2007 by 81 Latin American and Spanish writers and critics for the Colombian journal Semana of the 100 best novels in Spanish language in the last 25 years: Lumpérica (Nº58), El cuarto mundo (Nº67) y Los vigilantes (Nº100). In 2016 the journal Babelia, in Spain, selected one of Eltit's novels as one of the best 25 of century XXI.
Eltit's work has been the object of many studies. Casa de las Américas, in La Habana, dedicated to Eltit her Semana de Autor in 2002, and in 2006, the Universidad Católica de Chile organized the Coloquio Internacional de Escritores y Críticos: Homenaje a Diamela Eltit, which resulted in the book Diamela Eltit: redes locales, redes globales (Iberoamericana, 2009)
Eltit has two daughters and a son. She is married to Jorge Arrate, lawyer and economist. Her husband is the former president of the Socialist Party. In 2009 he was a presidential candidate representing a coalition between the Communist Party and socialist, humanist and Christian left groups.
