PARIS (AFP).- Chile's celebrated author Luis Sepulveda, who died Thursday aged 70 from COVID-19, was a committed writer exiled by the Pinochet dictatorship for his political activities.

Best-known for his 1992 novel, "The Old Man Who Read Love Stories", Sepulveda was particularly successful in Europe, where he had been based since the 1980s.

His works, appreciated for their simple humour and depictions of life in South America, have been translated in some 50 countries and range from novels, chronicles and novellas to children's stories.

Dark times under Pinochet
Sepulveda was born on October 4, 1949, at Ovalle, north of the Chilean capital Santiago. From a young age he was a political activist, first for Chile's Communist Youth, and then for the Socialists.

He was arrested and jailed for treason for two-and-a-half years in 1973 under the military regime of Augusto Pinochet.

He wrote of this dark period in "La locura de Pinochet" (2003), (Madness of Pinochet and other articles).

"I write because I believe in the militant force of words", he said in the book.

Pinochet imposed a right-wing dictatorship that lasted 17 years, during which at least 3,200 people were killed or disappeared. Around 38,000 were tortured.

After rights group Amnesty International intervened, Sepulveda was freed and escaped, living underground for nearly a year before being recaptured and sent into exile in 1977.

He never returned to live in Chile and it was only in 2017 that he regained his Chilean nationality, which had been stripped from him decades earlier.

After leaving his home country he travelled around Latin America, where he founded theatre troupes in Ecuador, Peru and Colombia.

In Nicaragua, he fought with the Sandinista revolution, which would overthrow the dictatorship in force at the time.

Amazon tribe and environmentalism
In 1978 Sepulveda spent a year living under a UNESCO study programme with the indigenous Shuar people in the Amazon.

They would feature in his first novel, published in 1992, "The Old Man Who Read Love Stories", a rallying call to redefine man's relationship with nature.

Translated into 35 languages, the novel was a global success and in 2001 it was adapted to the cinema by Rolf de Heer and starring Richard Dreyfuss in the main role.

Among Sepulveda's other most popular works was "The Story of a Seagull and the Cat Who Taught Her to Fly" (1996), a book "for young people from 8 to 88 years old", according to the subtitle on its original Spanish edition.

From 1982, Sepulveda settled in Europe, firstly in the German city of Hamburg, where he became a journalist and sailed the seas for several years on environmental activist group Greenpeace's boats.

With his first wife, the poet Carmen Yanez, who had been tortured under the Pinochet dictatorship, he settled down in 1996 at Gijon in Asturias, northern Spain.

"The writer has not changed... He is a stocky and discreet dinosaur, who resembles the late Charles Bronson," French daily Liberation wrote of him in 2017, referring to the US actor known for his tough-guy roles.

As a sideline, Sepulveda also wrote screenplays and directed films.

He first began showing symptoms of COVID-19 on February 25 after returning from a festival in Portugal.


© Agence France-Presse