Chilean writer Antonio Skarmeta, whose most famous novel inspired the film “The Postman,” has died at 83

Antonio Skarmeta is no more. The Chilean writer whose most famous novel “Une ardente patience” was adapted for the cinema in 1994 with “The Postman”, where Philippe Noiret plays Pablo Neruda, died Tuesday at the age of 83, his family announced the AFP.

“My father actually died this morning. It’s a long process that started years ago with Alzheimer’s disease and ended with a natural death,” said his son Fabian Skarmeta.

A tribute from the Chilean president

“Thank you, maestro, for the life you have lived. For stories, novels and theater. For political commitment,” wrote the President of Chile, Gabriel Boric, on his X account. He also thanked him for the television cultural program “El show de los libros” (The show of books) that this writer he of Croatian origin hosted on Chilean television in the 1990s and “who expanded the boundaries of literature”.

His novel “An Ardent Patience”, published in 1987, recounts the friendly relationship of a young postman with Pablo Neruda, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. The film adaptation by Michael Radford received the Oscar for best music in 1997. In 1999, he published the novel “La boda del poeta” (“The Poet’s Wedding” in French), which was rewarded in France with the Foreign Medici Prize in 2001.

Born on November 7, 1940 in Antofagasta, northern Chile, Antonio Skarmeta studied philosophy at the University of Chile, where he worked years later as a professor at the Faculty of Philosophy and a theater director. After Augusto Pinochet’s military coup in 1973, he went into exile first to Argentina, then to Germany, where he served as Chile’s ambassador in the 2000s.