Ramón Díaz Eterovic

Ramón Díaz Eterovic (left) with Gioconda Belli in 1989 when the two writers were awarded the Anna Seghers Scholarship from the Academy of Arts of the GDR .

Ramón Díaz Eterovic (born July 15, 1956 in Punta Arenas ) is a Chilean writer of Croatian descent. Today he lives in the capital of the country, Santiago .

He is known not only in Chile for his series of novels about the detective Heredia. He also lives in Santiago and is prone to melancholy and alcohol consumption. The second main character in the novels is Heredias Kater Simenon, with whom the detective has regular dialogues. The first novel, La ciudad está triste , was published in 1987, during Augusto Pinochet's military dictatorship . Accordingly, many of the cases Heredia takes on involve crimes that are directly or indirectly related to this section of Chilean history. In Nadie sabe más que los muertos, for example, a woman, whose daughter was kidnapped, tortured and killed by the military during the dictatorship, instructs him to look for her grandson; In Ángeles y solitarios , Heredia is on the trail of old arms dealerships.

From 1980 to 1995 Díaz Eterovic was editor-in-chief of the poetry magazine La Gota Pura , from 1991 to 1993 president of the Sociedad de Escritores de Chile (i. E. The Chilean writers' association). In Chile he has received over 30 literary prizes, including the Premio del Consejo Nacional del Libro y la Lectura (Prize of the National Reading and Book Council) in 1995 and the Premio Municipal de Santiago (the City of Santiago Book Prize) in 1996 and 2002.

The Heredia series currently comprises ten volumes, some of which have also been translated into other languages ​​( Portuguese , French , Croatian, etc.). Two were also published in German by Diogenes Verlag , which has now taken Díaz Eterovic's works out of its program.

Title of the Heredia novels

• La ciudad está triste ("The city is sad")
• Solo en la oscuridad ("Alone in the Dark")
• Nadie sabe más que los muertos ("Nobody knows more than the dead")
• Nunca enamores a un forastero ("Never fall in love with a stranger")
• Ángeles y solitarios ("Angels and Solitary One")
• Correr tras el viento ("Following the wind")
• Los siete hijos de Simenon ("Hangover and Kitty")
• El ojo del alma ("The eye of the soul")
• El hombre que pregunta ("The man who asks")
• A la sombra del dinero ("In the shadow of money").

In addition, the short story volume Muchos gatos para un solo crimen ("Many hangovers for a single crime")

Web links

Commons : Ramón Díaz Eterovic  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Ramón Díaz Eterovic in the catalog of the German National Library