Manuel Rojas

Who was Manuel Rojas?

Manuel Rojas Sepúlveda was a Chilean writer and journalist.

Rojas was born in the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina, the son of Chilean parents. In 1899 his family returned to Santiago, but in 1903, after the father's death, the mother returned to Buenos Aires again, where he attended school until the age of eleven. In 1912, at the age of sixteen, he decided to return alone to Chile. Once he arrived to the country, he got involved with intellectuals and anarchist groups, while working in many different activities as an unskilled labourer: as house painter, electrician, agricultural worker, railroad handyman, loading ships, tailor's apprentice, cobbler, ship guard, and actor in small-time itinerant groups. Many of the situations and characters he encountered there later became part of his fictional world.

He returned to Argentina in 1921 publishing his first poems there. Back in Chile, he worked intensely in his narrative production and at the same time he worked in the National Library and at the Universidad de Chile press. He married María Baeza and had three children. He joined the Los Tiempos and the Las Ultimas Noticias newspapers as a linotype operator first and ultimately worked on Santiago newspapers as a journalist, all the while also working at the Hipódromo Chile. After the death of his wife, he married again and started to travel. He received the Chilean National Prize for Literature in 1957. He toured Europe, South America and the Middle East. He became a university professor of Chilean and American Literature in the US and at the Universidad de Chile.