Gabriela Etcheverry (born 1946) is a Chilean-Canadian writer, translator and literary critic who is also known for her role in Hispanic-Canadian cultural life.
Etcheverry was born in a poor district of Coquimbo in Chile. She worked as a teacher in the capital Santiago where she married.[1]
She arrived in Canada with little skill in either French or English.[1] She however received her PhD in literature at Laval University, Quebec. She has two MA degrees (Comparative Literature and Spanish) from Carleton University, Ottawa. She taught courses in language, literature, culture and civilization at Carleton University and at other agencies in Ottawa, Canada, and currently works in translation and interpretation. She has published novels, short stories, poems, essays, reviews and reports.[2]
As a literary critic, cultural promoter and co-director of the Red Cultural Hispánica (Hispanic Cultural Network) she has organized conferences on Hispano-Canadian authors (Jorge Etcheverry, 2007; Nela Rio, 2008) and hosted other literary events.[3][4] Etcheverry runs a literary magazine[5] and a children’s multilingual publishing house.[6] She is on the board of a trilingual academic/literary publisher.[7]
In 2008, Etcheverry won first prize in the "nuestra palabra" short story competition. Titled Nuestra palabra in Spanish, it was translated into English as Our Words.[8] Her autobiographical novel Latitudes (2012) describes how while pregnant she moved to Canada to escape Pinochet's dictatorship. Some of its themes are continued in her more recent collection of short stories, The Breadfruit Tree (2013).[1] Her literary work suggests the "ambivalent identity" and "double affiliation"[9] of someone with strong ties to two different countries. Some of her work can be seen as "migration literature".[10] For example, in her novella El Regreso there is a "metaphorical parallel between the return to the mother's house with the migratory return of an exile".[11]
Etcheverry has spoken at various Canadian conferences relating to immigration, and created theatrical pieces about migration and about women's experiences of torture in Chile which have been presented in various different settings. The Department of Citizenship and Immigration invited her to visit schools to discuss experiences of migration with students, sharing poetry, stories etc., as part of a program called Passages to Canada.[12]
