Juan Radrigán

At the age of 25 he published his first volume of short stories Los Vencidos no Creen en Dios, followed six years later by his second novel El Vino de la Cobardía.

The majority of these individuals occupy grey and depressed urban worlds, e.g. a crumbling block of flats in La Felicidad de los Garcia (1983) and a filthy, dilapidated brothel in El Toro por las Astas (1982).

Others exist in further marginalised spheres, deserted dumps on the outskirts of Santiago (Hechos Consumados, 1981), and withering farmlands far from civilisation (Las Brutas, 1980).

Radrigán began publishing work amid the Pinochet dictatorship, although his narratives reflect a lived experience of a country long-accustomed to poverty.

Although not explicitly political, it is difficult not to observe the autobiographically infused nature of Radrigan's plays, particularly given his poverty-stricken upbringing, “without mentioning it by name, effectively indicts the Pinochet regime for its complicity in the brutalization of the poor”.