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WLT AUTHOR FACTS
AUTHOR Ariel Dorfman (b. 1942)
COUNTRY Chile
PRINCIPLES GENRES Fiction, Verse, Theater, Essays
ARIEL DORFMAN is a Chilean novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, journalist, and human-rights activist. Born in Argentina in 1942 to Jewish immigrants, Dorfman was forced to move to the United States with his family in 1945 due to anti-Semitism and political intolerance. They then became the victims of McCarthyism in 1954, when Dorfman's father was targeted as a communist threat. They next fled to Chile, where Dorfman eventually gained citizenship. When Auguste Pinochet led a coup in 1973 against Salvador Allende, Dorfman was forced into exile again. He currently lives in Durham, North Carolina, where he is a professor at Duke University, and now considers himself an expatriate.
The author of eight novels, seven plays, a travel narrative, a memoir, and several collections of essays, short stories, and poetry, Dorfman launched his international success with Death and the Maiden (1992), a play about the complex and painful issues that confront nations as they transition from dictatorship to democracy. His most recent works are a novel co-written with his son, Joaquin, The Burning City (2003); the play Purgatorio (which premiered in London in 2004); Exorcising Terror: The Incredible Unending Trial of Augusta Pinochet (2002), an account of the Pinochet case; and a travel narrative about the north of Chile, Desert Memories: Journeys through the Chilean North (2003). I interviewed him via telephone as part of the research for my forthcoming book on his work, Ariel Dorfman: An Aesthetics of Hope, to be published by Duke University Press in 2005.
Sophia McClennen In interviews conducted during the Pinochet regime, you often referred to Latin American writers who had influenced your work. You also studied Renaissance literature and published your first book of essays on the theater of Harold Pinter. What do you consider to be your major literary influences? And do you see any shift in the writers you are in dialogue with in your recent literary projects versus those who most influenced you during your years in exile?
Ariel Dorfman I continue to think that one of my fundamental influences is Shakespeare. My thesis was on Shakespeare, so the Renaissance, the baroque, and the picaresque are very important to me. But...