Luis Sepulveda: Chilean writer and outspoken opponent of the Pinochet regime

He was jailed and tortured but in exile forged an international reputation for his writing and activism

Sepulveda, here in 2017, won many awards for his contribution to the arts and literature (EPA)

Luis Sepulveda was a Chilean communist militant turned award-winning author who wrote poetry, short stories, bestselling novels and children’s books. He was one of the thousands of victims of the political struggle that shook Chile in the 1970s, where he was jailed, tortured and exiled under Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship.

Condemned to a life of exile from his mid-twenties for his political affiliations and militancy, Sepulveda – who has died of coronavirus aged 70 – also became an avid traveller who often wrote political and environmentally conscious works, including his most famous work, The Old Man Who Read Love Novels.

Sepulveda was born in Ovalle, a small city in the centre of Chile, in 1949, the son of a young runaway couple fleeing family disapproval of his mother’s pregnancy. His father Luis was a communist militant and restaurant owner and his mother, Irma Calfucura, was a nurse of Mapuche descent, a group of indigenous inhabitants of south-central Chile.

After being chased away from Ovalle, the couple relocated in Santiago de Chile, where Sepulveda grew up. Following his father’s example, Sepulveda made his first political incursion at 15 by joining Las Juventudes Comunistas, the communist youth group, quickly becoming a leader of the student movement.

He would go on to study theatre production in the University de Chile and worked in the department of cultural affairs in the administration of the president, Salvador Allende, Latin America’s first Marxist politician to be elected to high office.

On 11 September 1973 Allende was ousted in a US-backed coup, and died that day (officially suicide by gunshot, though claims of assassination persist). Shortly afterwards, Sepulveda was jailed. It was the start of a 17-year-long dictatorship in the country, during which at least 3,200 people died and 38,000 were tortured, Sepulveda being among the torture victims.

Amnesty International campaigned for his release, and in 1977 he was freed and placed under house arrest. With political persecution at its height, he escaped and went underground for almost a year, during which he founded and led a resistance theatre troupe.

However, with the visibility of the troupe came his second arrest. This time he was sentenced to life in prison, subsequently reduced to 28 years. The German branch of Amnesty intervened on his behalf again, successfully negotiating a seven-year exile from Chile. He and wife Carmen Yanez were divorced around this time, and he later married a German woman, Margarita, although this also ended in divorce.

Sepulveda was due to go to Sweden to teach Spanish literature, but in a layover stop in Buenos Aires he fled and began a journey travelling in Latin America, passing through Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay and Ecuador. In 1978, he found himself in the Amazon jungle of Ecuador under a Unesco study programme, living with the indigenous Shuar people – a year-long stay which would later inspire his most famous novel.

A year later he travelled to Nicaragua to join the Sandinista National Liberation Front, which was leading the revolution to overthrow the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza. After the revolution’s success in 1979, he left for Germany.

In Hamburg he began his career as a journalist, continuing his many travels to Latin America and Africa. In 1982 Sepulveda became affiliated with Greenpeace and until 1987 served as a crew member of the Rainbow Warrior. He wrote his novel The World at the End of the World (1989) based on his experience on board.

In Germany he also wrote The Old Man Who Read Love Stories, an ecologically conscious novel set in the Ecuadorian Amazon, which was dedicated to the memory of murdered ecological activist Chico Mendes and was published in 1989. The novel was translated into 35 languages and won the Spanish literary prize Tigre Juan that year. It was later made into a 2001 movie starring American actor Richard Dreyfuss.

He went on to write dozens of other novels where, aside from politics, nature would become the central character of his stories. In 2002 he wrote and directed a film called Nowhere, about an ex-marine’s plans to liberate five dissidents from a South American prison camp.

In the 1990s he reunited with his ex-wife Carmen Yanez. She had also been detained and tortured by Pinochet’s police, but eventually was granted political asylum in Sweden, where she had been living ever since.

In 1997 the remarried couple settled in Spain, where Sepulveda wrote more novels as well as children’s books. He continued to participate in political discussions through his blog and involvement with the monthly newspaper Le Monde Diplomatique.

He received distinctions for his writing including the Order of the Arts and Letters of France, which recognises significant contributions to the arts and literature.

He never returned to live in Chile: he had been stripped of his nationality, although it was restored in 2017. He continued to speak out about events in the country, such as the protests that began in October last year. These began over the rise in public transport costs, but became a protest against wider inequality. He continued to demand for the reversal of the privatisation of sea and water, which he called an “inhuman economic model”. He wrote: “No rebellion is more just and democratic than that of the Chileans. And no repression, however harsh or criminal, can hold back a people rising up against it.”

He is survived by Yanez and his five children.

Luis Sepulveda, writer, born 4 October 1949, died 16 April 2020