Born in Argentina and raised in both the U.S. and Chile, Ariel Dorfman was part of the momentous democratic movement that brought Salvador Allende to power in Chile; later, he took a role in that government. When Chile’s popular revolution came to an end, Dorfman’s life was spared—but many of his friends did not survive. Dorfman has since confronted the haunting memory of the coup in his books, which include The Empire’s Old Clothes, Widows, Mascara, Blake’s Therapy, Konfidenz, The Nanny and the Iceberg, Other Septembers, Desert Memories, and his prize-winning memoir, Heading South, Looking North, which was the basis for the documentary, A Promise to the Dead, short listed for the Oscars 2008. His play Death and the Maiden (which won the Olivier Award, among dozens of other awards worldwide) was adapted for film by Roman Polanski. His intellectual concerns range wide, from the trial of Augusto Pinochet to bilingualism to American cartoons—his book How to Read Donald Duck was called by John Berger, “a handbook for decolonization.” Dorfman will take part in a very special discussion about art and politics with Gabriel Sanders, deputy editor of the online magazine Tablet.
PEN BLOG
• Lyn Miller-Lachmann: En route to work every Sunday morning I pass a house in the upstate New York town of Rotterdam where someone attaches large political banners and sometimes a U.S. flag to a fence that borders I-890. [more]
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