Jaime Luis Huenún

Jaime Luis Huenún was born in 1967 in Valdivia, southern Chile. He is an award-winning Mapuche-Huilliche poet writing in Spanish. His books include Ceremonias (1999), Puerto Trakl (2001), Reducciones (2012), Fanon City Meu (2014), and La calle Maldestam y otros territorios apócrifos (2016). He has received numerous awards, including the Pablo Neruda Prize (2003), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2005), and the Chilean National Council on Arts and Culture’s Best Work of Literature 2013 for Reducciones. He has also edited several anthologies of Mapuche and Latin American indigenous poetry, including Epu mari ülkatufe ta fachantü: 20 poetas mapuche contemporáneos (Lom, 2003), Los Cantos Ocultos: Antología de poesía indígena latinoamericana (2008), and Poetry of the Earth: Mapuche Trilingual Anthology (2013). His poetry was first introduced to English-language readers in Cecilia Vicuña’s ÜL: Four Mapuche Poets (1998) and later in the full-length book, Port Trakl (2008), translated by Daniel Borzutzky. Fanon City Meu was translated into Italian in 2015.

Jaime Huenún currently lives in Santiago, Chile, where he works in the Chilean Ministry of Culture’s Department of Intercultural Studies, prior to which he taught literature at several Chilean universities, including the Universidad Diego Portales and the Universidad Alberto Hurtado. He has been invited to many international literary events in the United States, England, Spain, Australia, Colombia, and Argentina. Aside from English, his poetry has been translated into Mapudungun, Italian, German, French, Dutch, Portuguese, and Catalan.

Links:

Spanish Wikipedia

Poetry Foundation on Chile’s Best Work of Poetry 2013

Poems from Port Trakl

Review of Port Trakl at Tarpaulin Sky