Raúl Zurita

Raúl Zurita (b. 1950 in Santiago de Chile, Chile) is one of the most striking contemporary Latin American poets. His poetry expresses, like almost no other, in a precise and powerful torrent of words the tension between the suffering subject and anger towards history.
Zurita was arrested after the military coup in 1973 and incarcerated with nearly 100 other people in the hull of a ship. After his release he founded the radical artists' group CADA, in which he made a mark above all with his provocative and very physical performances. He gave expression to his protest against the Pinochet regime by having poems written from vapour trails in the sky over New York or scratching verses as "wounds" in the Atacama Desert.
Zurita inscribed himself permanently into the cultural memory of Latin America with his trilogy “Purgatorio” (1979), “Anteparaíso” (1982) and “La vida nueva” (1993), which modified Dante's “Divine Comedy”. His prizes for this includethe Pablo Neruda Prize (1989), the Chilean National Prize for Literature (2000) and the José Lezama Lima Prize (Cuba, 2006).
Violent controversy followed the publication in 2006 of his work “Los Países muertos” (The dead countries), in which he explicitly and mercilessly criticised personalities from the cultural life of Chile. In spite of his controversial nature – or even because of it – as the foreword to an anthology of contemporary Chilean poetry in 1986 puts it, "the new poetry of Chile is measured against the work of Raul Zuritas."
Publications (a selection):
Purgatorio, Universitaria, Santiago de Chile 1979.
Anteparaíso, Asociados, Santiago de Chile 1982.
Canto a su amor desaparecido,Universitaria, Santiago de Chile 1985.
La vida nueva, Universitaria, Santiago de Chile 1994.
Poemas militantes, Dolmen Ediciones, Santiago de Chile 2000.
Sobre el amor y el sufrimiento, Editorial Andrés Bello, Barcelona 2000.
INRI, Fondo de Cultura Económica, Santiago de Chile 2003.
Mi mejilla es el cielo estrellado, Instituto Coahuilense de Cultura, Saltillo, Coahuila 2004.
Los Países Muertos,Ediciones Tácitas, Santiago de Chile 2006.
Las ciudades de agua, Ediciones Era, México D. F. 2007.
Cuadernos de guerra, Ediciones Amargord, Madrid 2009. 
Raúl Zurita at ZVAB