I Dreamt the Snow was Burning

ANTONIO SKÁRMETA was born in Antofagasta, Chile, in 1940, in the Croatian/Yugoslav immigrant community This and other immigrant groups in Chile appear in Fish, Taking the Plunge and others of his stories. He studied philosophy, literature, and theatre directing at the University of Chile (working with Victor Jara) and later at Columbia University in New York. In Chile up to the military coup of 1973 he held university posts in contemporary philosophy and literature, won the Casa de las Américas prize for his stories in 1969, ran writing workshops in the Santiago shantytowns, and was the cultural editor of three magazines: Ercilla (an epic poet of the 16th century), Ahora (Today), and La Quinta Rueda (The Fifth Wheel). He also translated Norman Mailer, William Golding, Herman Melville, Jack Kerouac and F. Scott Fitzgerald for Chilean readers. After 1973 he lived in Argentina, then Portugal, then settled in West Berlin where he completed his novel I Dreamt the Snow was Burning -- available from Readers International -- and also taught scriptwriting at the German Film and Television Academy and the University of Bonn. In 1980 he travelled to Nicaragua and wrote the screenplay for La Insurrecci¿n, which was filmed by Peter Lilienthal. In 1985 his novel Burning Patience was published to international acclaim and was filmed from his own screenplay, but was also adapted independently as a film in Italy as Il Postino, which went on to win an Academy Award in 1994. In 1989 when General Pinochet lost the election, Antonio Skármeta returned to Chile and began hosting a hugely popular TV program on literature and the arts. From 2000 to 2003 he served as the Chilean ambassador in Germany. He later began teaching alternate semesters in Chile and in US universities. Among the many literary prizes won by Antonio Skármeta are the French Prix Médicis Étranger (2001), the Premio Iberoamericano Planeta-Casa de América de Narrativa (2011) and Chile's National Literature Prize (2014).

On 11 September 1973 General Augusto Pinochet led a military coup against the elected government of Salvador Allende, bombing La Moneda, the presidential seat in Chile's capital Santiago where the President died resisting the attack.The National Football Stadium became a torture centre, where supporters of Allende's Popular Unity government were rounded up, tortured, and - like the popular singer Victor Jara - brutally killed. Chile's Nobel-prize winning poet Pablo Neruda also died in mysterious circumstances immediately following the coup.Thousands of Chileans disappeared, now known to have been murdered, and many others went into exile, including the writer Antonio Skármeta, who was completing his first novel I Dreamt the Snow was Burning, set in the weeks just before the coup, where football, Neruda's poetry, the growing tensions of the period clash around the inhabitants of a cheap Santiago boarding house, from petty crooks to fervent supporters of Popular Unity. Into their midst comes a football-mad country boy longing only to be a massive star - and of course to score with the girls."Skármeta strikes a brilliant balance between realistic portrayals of daily life and stream-of-consciousness scenes… His ability to amplify emotional undercurrents and capture the raw poetry of everyday language is impressive. Journalist Malcolm Coad deserves praise for the lucidity and electrical vibrancy of his translation." SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE