Wissenswertes

Member of the jury at the Berlin International Film Festival 1987

Member of the jury at the Venice Film Festival in 1996.

Lives in Berlin, Germany, since 1975.

He has a TV programm on chilenian television named "El show de los libros", he is very proud of his book "Il postino", because it can be nominated for an Oscar. (1996)

Worked as a writer with Peter Lilienthal and Christian Ziewer.

(1973-1989) Exiled in Berlin, Germany, thanks to Peter Lilienthal, with whom he had worked on a film just before the September 1973 military coup in Chile. Lilienthal had been a German exile in Uruguay during the Nazi regime in Germany.

(2000-2003) Chile ambassador to Germany.

Skármeta studied at Instituto Nacional of Santiago.

Antonio Skármeta was a Chilean writer, scriptwriter and director descending from Croatian immigrants from the Adriatic island of Brac, Dalmatia.

His 1985 novel and film Ardiente paciencia ("Burning Patience") inspired the 1994 Academy Award-winning movie, Il Postino (The Postman). Subsequent editions of the book bore the title El cartero de Neruda (Neruda's Postman). Since then, his fiction has won numerous awards and been adapted into nearly thirty different languages.

On September 7, 2015, he was elected a full member of the Chilean Academy of Language to occupy seat number 20, which was vacant after the death, the previous year, of Óscar Pinochet de la Barra.

His 2010 novel Un padre de película was the basis of O Filme da Minha Vida, a Brazilian film released in 2017. Skármeta himself suggested the project to Brazilian director and actor Selton Mello.

From 1967 to 1973, the year he left Chile (first to Buenos Aires and later to West Berlin), he taught literature at the University of Chile.

In 2002 he received the "Goethe Medal" in Germany.

His unpublished play El Plebiscito was the basis of Pablo Larraín's successful 2012 drama film "No".

He was awarded Chile's National Literature Prize in 2014.

Skármeta studied philosophy and literature both in Chile and at Columbia University in New York.

He was part of a select group of Chilean authors, along with figures such as Isabel Allende and Roberto Bolaño , who have achieved international recognition both critically and popularly.

In 2011 his novel Los días del arco iris won the prestigious Premio Iberoamericano Planeta-Casa de América de Narrativa, one of the richest literary prizes in the world worth $200,000.

Passionate about cinema, Skármeta has written several scripts and directed at least two films.