Abstract
How the censorship of books has evolved since 1973
Born in Santiago de Chile in 1931, Jorge Edwards is a distinguished novelist and short story writer, whose writing career began in 1952 with El Patio and has included such works as Los Convidados de Piedra (1978), and Las Máscaras (1980). He also served Chile as a diplomat, and represented Salvador Allende's government in Cuba for several months in 1971. His experiences there provided the material for a book, Persona Non Grata which at one time had the dubious distinction of being banned in both Chile and Cuba. Edwards resigned from his diplomatic career when General Pinochet took over in 1973, and lived in Spain for several years. Since his return to Chile in 1978, he has dedicated himself to writing and to the defence of writers' freedoms, being one of the founders of the Chilean Committee for the Freedom of Expression. Here he traces the various stages of the Pinochet regime's attempts to suppress and control the publication and distribution of books in Chile.