Chilean poet and essayist, one of the most important figures in contemporary Latin American poetry. Born in 1950 in Santiago. Studied at the Federico Santa María Technical University. After the 1973 military coup, he was arrested and tortured. In 1979, he became a founding member of the avant-garde group CADA. Author of Purgatorio (1979), Anteparaíso (1982), La vida nueva (1994), INRI (2003), Zurita (2011), and others. Known for large-scale poetic actions: in 1982, his text was written by airplanes in the sky over New York; in 1993, it was carved into the Atacama Desert. Laureate of the National Prize for Literature of Chile (2000), the Queen Sofía Prize for Ibero-American Poetry (2020), and other awards.