Biography:

Víctor Carvajal was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1944. He studied drama in Santiago at the Escuela de Teatro at the Universidad de Chile. He and two other graduates co-founded a political theater group called Teatro Nuevo Popular (TNP), in which he acted. TNP’s mission and program resonated with the policies of Chile’s Unidad Popular party. Shortly before the 1973 military coup, TNP was preparing a staging of Brecht’s Mutter Courage and Her Children; because of his political engagement, Carvajal had to leave Chile after the coup. 

In 1974, Carvajal emigrated to East Germany with the intention of joining the Berliner Ensemble. He considered himself a follower of Bertolt Brecht and wanted to learn more about his plays and theories of theater. Once Carvajal arrived in the GDR, he was not allowed to stay in Berlin, but made to settle in Rostock, where he was offered work at the Volkstheater Rostock. There, together with other exiled Chilean artists, Carvajal founded the Teatro Lautaro ensemble in 1974. With Chilean director Carlos Medina and other Chilean artists who were in exile in East Germany, Carvajal worked on various Teatro Lautaro productions, including a stage adaptation of Pablo Neruda’s poem “Margarita Naranjo;” the children’s play Der geflochtene Kreis (The Braided Circle) by Jorge Gajardo, with which the ensemble toured in France and The Netherlands; and Die Nacht des Soldaten (The Night of the Soldier) by Carlos Cerda, which premiered at the Volkstheater Rostock in 1975.

During his exile in East Germany, Carvajal also wrote plays. One of his most remarkable was Untergang der Zentauren (1977, The Downfall of the Centaurs). Performed by Teatro Lautaro and directed by Hans-Uwe Haus, it premiered at the Volkstheater Rostock and toured at festivals in Portugal and Greece. His other plays were performed at various GDR theaters, including the Kinder- und Jugendtheater Junge Garde in Halle, the Workers’ Theater in Wismar and the Theater der Freundschaft and bat (Berliner Atelier Theater) in Berlin. He also began to write his first children’s stories, which were published in the following years.

Carvajal acted in two films produced by the DEFA Studio for Feature Film in Potsdam-Babelsberg. In 1978, he played a policeman, who tries to capture three Chileans who are attempting to flee to Argentina after the coup in Chile, in Orlando Lübbert’s Der Übergang. Director Rainer Simon then cast Carvajal in the role of Sorigueta, the Spanish chauffeur of German inventor Stannebein, in his experimental literary adaptation of Das Luftschiff.

Keeping Teatro Lautaro going became difficult: some of its members left the company, seeking to advance their professions; two of the founding members moved to Berlin to study at bat, linked to the Berliner Ensemble; those who stayed in Rostock began writing or teaching at the city’s theater school and Rostock University’s Institute of Latin American Studies. Teatro Lautaro closed in 1982. That same year, Carvajal also left the GDR for Ecuador, where he became the artistic director of the theater department of the Universidad Católica de Quito. Two years later, in 1984, he returned to Chile, where he has since worked as an author, actor, translator and playwright.

In 1987, Carvajal founded the independent theater company Teatro Delencuentro in Chile. It staged two productions: El calandrajo (The Good-for-Nothing), which he had written in 1985-86; and, in 1987, the children’s comedy El caballero pobre (Armer Ritter; Poor Knight), by German playwright Peter Hacks, in a translation that Carvajal himself rendered from the German.

Today, Carvajal is well known as an author of children’s and young adult books. He sees his work in the tradition of social realism and has focused on social issues and problems faced by ethnic groups in Chile. Many of his books have won international recognition. His first book of stories for children, Cuentatrapos, received the 1984 Barco de Vapor prize in Spain. The International Board on Books for Young People in Switzerland, which promotes exceptional international children’s literature, added several of his books to their Honors List, including Como un salto de campana and Mamire, el último niño. The world’s largest library for international children’s and youth literature, Munich’s International Youth Library, owns over twenty of Carvajal’s books. In 2014, Publishers Weekly called Carvajal “one of the best-known authors of children’s and young adult books in the Spanish-speaking world.”

Víctor Carvajal lives in Santiago, Chile, and is currently working on a collection of the myths and legends of Chilean natives. His books have been published in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, France, Germany, Mexico, Spain and elsewhere.

Hiltrud Schulz, DEFA Film Library, thanks Víctor Carvajal for generously sharing information about his life and work. (October 2018)

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