Raúl Zurita

Raúl Zurita, winner of the Chilean National Poetry Prize, is one of the most vital voices in contemporary Latin American literature. Coming out of the Chilean avant-garde (and, through his grandmother, out of the Italian tradition for poetic sequences), Zurita’s work is nevertheless incredibly intimate and often shocking in its emotional immediacy and clarity. He is the creator of massive landscape poems bulldozed into the Atacama Desert and poems skywritten over New York. Arrested and tortured by the Pinochet dictatorship, Zurita has, in his life as in his work, transformed rage and pain into transcendent compassion. Among his many books in Spanish are the Dantesque trilogy Purgatorio, Anteparaíso, and La Vida Nueva. Other important books include Zurita and El día más blanco. His books in English translation include Purgatory, Dreams of Kurosawa, Song for His Disappeared Love, and INRI.