Raúl Zurita Canessa was born in Santiago de Chile on January 10, 1950. He studied at the Liceo Lastarria and at the Federico Santa María Technical University of Valparaíso, where he graduated as a Structural Engineer; it was around that time that he joined the Communist Party. On the same day as the coup d’état led by Augusto Pinochet, he was arrested and tortured. Zurita has been a visiting lecturer at the universities of Tufts, California and Harvard and he currently lectures at Diego Portales. In 1979 he published his first book, Purgatory. He was part of the CADA (Colectivo de Acciones de Arte) group. In 1982 he published Anteparadise and in 1994 he finished the trilogy with La vida nueva (1994). With the return of democracy, in 1990 he was appointed Cultural Attaché in Rome. In 2007 he published Los países muertos, a book that provoked considerable controversy, and Las ciudades de agua. In 2000 he received the Chilean National Prize for Literature. In 2015 he was awarded honorary doctorates by the University of Alicante and by the Federico Santa María Technical University. In 2016 he won the Pablo Neruda Ibero-American Poetry Prize. His most recent work is Sobre la noche el cielo y al final el mar (2021, Penguin Random House).