Gonzalo Rojas

He was the seventh son of a coal mining engineer, born in the port town of Lebu, Chile.

Between 1938 and 1941 he played a part in the surrealist group Mandrágora founded by Braulio Arenas, Teófilo Cid and Enrique Gómez Correa.

During the late 1950s and early 1960s, as the head of the Department of Spanish and later the director of summer courses, Gonzalo was instrumental in establishing a number of workshops that helped define earlier generations of Chilean writers and which brought international writers to Chile to participate in these events and congresses.

Thanks to a Guggenheim Fellowship, Gonzalo Rojas went back to Chile in 1979, to Chillán, 400 kilometers to the south of the capital, to live permanently, yet was still unable to teach at a university there.

His poetry has been translated into English, German, French, Portuguese, Russian, Italian, Romanian, Swedish, Chinese, Japanese, Turkish, Bengali and Greek.