Ariel Dorfman

Ariel Dorfman was born on May 6, 1942, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to Jewish immigrants from Ukraine and Bessarabia. He moved to the United States with his family when he was an infant, and then to Chile in 1954. He attended and taught at the University of Chile in Santiago, where he became a Chilean citizen in 1967. He was a cultural adviser to President Salvador Allende from 1970 to 1973, and a member of the leftist group Montoneros. After the military coup that overthrew Allende and installed the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, Dorfman went into exile, living in France, the Netherlands, and the United States. He became a U.S. citizen in 2004, and a professor of literature and Latin American studies at Duke University since 1985. He also divided his time between the United States and Chile after the restoration of democracy in 1990. Dorfman is a prolific and acclaimed writer of novels, plays, essays, and poetry, often dealing with themes of political oppression, exile, human rights, and cultural identity. His most famous work is the play Death and the Maiden (1990), which was adapted into a film by Roman Polanski in 1994. The play depicts a former political prisoner who confronts her alleged torturer and rapist years after the end of the dictatorship. Some of his other notable works include the novels Widows (1981), Konfidenz (1994), and Blake's Therapy (1999), the memoir Heading South, Looking North (1998), and the essay collection How to Read Donald Duck (1971), co-written with Armand Mattelart, which criticizes the cultural imperialism of the United States through the analysis of Disney comics. Dorfman has received many awards and honors for his literary and activist work, such as the Laurence Olivier Award, the Roger L. Stevens Award, the National Book Award for Translation, the PEN Center USA Award, the Premio Iberoamericano de Letras José Donoso, and the Guggenheim Fellowship. He is also a regular contributor to various newspapers and magazines, such as The New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, and The New Yorker.