Demetrio Aguilera Malta (Guayaquil, May 24, 1909 – México D.F., December 29, 1981) was an Ecuadorian writer, director, painter, and diplomat.

Aguilera Malta spent much of his childhood on his family's farm on an island in the Gulf of Guayaquil.

Later, he studied literature on a Ministry of Education scholarship in Ecuador and in Madrid, just before the start of the Spanish Civil War.

[2] 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.

He was a founding member of the Casa de la Cultura (House of Ecuadorian Culture) and of the Guayaquil Group (together with his best friend Joaquín Gallegos Lara), of the Iberoamerican Community of Writers, and of the Latin American House of Culture.

In 1971, he received a gold medal from the Municipality of Guayaquil during the Latin American Writers Meeting.

In 1954, Aguilera Malta filmed four documentaries commissioned by the Ministry of Public Works to promote Ecuador.