Luis Sepúlveda was politically active first as a leader of the student movement and in the Salvador Allende administration in the department of cultural affairs where he was in charge of a series of cheap editions of classics for the general public.

After the Chilean coup of 1973 which brought to power General Augusto Pinochet he was jailed for two-and-a-half years and then obtained a conditional release through the efforts of the German branch of Amnesty International and was kept under house arrest.

The German section of Amnesty International intervened again and his prison sentence was commuted to eight years of exile, and in 1977 he left Chile to fly to Sweden where he was supposed to teach Spanish literature.

During the expedition he shared the life of the Shuars for seven months and came to an understanding of Latin America as a multicultural and multilingual continent where the Marxism he was taught was not applicable to a rural population that was dependent on its surrounding natural environment.

He went to Hamburg in Germany because of his admiration of German literature (he learned the language in prison) especially the romantics such as Novalis and Friedrich Hölderlin and worked there as journalist traveling widely in Latin America and Africa.

[8] By March 11, it was reported that Sepúlveda was in critical condition, that he was in an induced coma with assisted breathing due to multiple organ failure in an Oviedo hospital.

[11] Scott M. DeVries asserts that several moments in The Old Man Who Read Love Stories "articulate an environmentalist ideology from the perspective of the Spanish American novela de la selva.