Jorgenrique Adoum

Jorgenrique Adoum (1926-2009) was a poet, novelist, essayist, and playwright. Of Lebanese descent, he was born in the Andean town of Amato, Ecuador. As a young man he moved to Santiago de Chile and served as Novel Prize-winning Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s personal secretary. Throughout his life he held important cultural posts both in his country and later abroad, as an exile. He published 14 books of poetry and was hailed by Neruda as the “best poet of his generation in Latin America.” He was the winner of the first ever Casa de las Américas Prize in 1960 and shortlisted for the Cervantes Prize in 2005, among many other distinctions. Despite such accolades, his work is absolutely unknown in the English-speaking world.