The writer Luis Sepúlveda died this Thursday in Spain, where he had been hospitalized since the end of February after contracting the coronavirus.
Luis Sepúlveda (Ovalle, Chile, 1949), died at the Central University Hospital of Asturias (Oviedo, northern Spain). The writer, screenwriter and director of Chilean cinema, living in Gijón (Asturias) since 1997, was diagnosed with coronavirus and admitted after returning from the literary festival Correntes dÉscritas, held in Póvoa de Varzim, in Portugal.
Sepúlveda was the first patient diagnosed with COVID-19 in Asturias (northern Spain) and had been admitted to the Central University Hospital of Asturias (HUCA) in Oviedo for 48 days, most of them connected to a ventilator in the Intensive Care Unit. , where he died at 10:18 am.
Sepúlveda began to feel bad on February 25, two days after attending the Correntes dÉscritas literary festival. This festival was held in Póvoa de Varzim, in the north of Portugal, in which a hundred speakers from different countries participated, none of them considered at risk due to the incidence of the coronavirus.
After being diagnosed with pneumonia in a private center and having tested positive for the Covid-19, Sepúlveda was transferred to a HUCA isolation area on February 29 with his wife, the poet Carmen Yáñez, who also he had a feverish picture.
The state of health of the author of «An old man who read love novels» has deteriorated in recent weeks as he did not respond to successive treatments or antibiotics and added to the initial pneumonia other pathologies and problems associated with different vital organs. , health sources pointed out to Efe
The family released a statement, signed by his wife Carmen Yáñez and his eldest son, Carlos, in which he thanks «wholeheartedly» to the HUCA medical-health team «for their great professionalism and dedication», as well as «the samples of affection received during these days ».
Author of more than twenty novels, travel books, scripts and essays, he won the 1989 Tigre Juan Prize for «An old man who read love novels» and the Primavera de Novela in 2009 for «La sombra de lo que nosotros» .
A communist militant, Sepúlveda had been forced to leave his native Chile in 1977, after being retaliated by the dictatorial regime of Augusto Pinochet and having seen a sentence of 28 years in prison commuted to another eight years in exile.
The son of a Basque mother and a Jaén father, Sepúlveda traveled through countries such as Nicaragua and Sweden before settling in Hamburg (Germany), a city where he worked as a press correspondent and wrote stories, theater and some novels.
Sepúlveda, known internationally since 1988 with the publication of «An old man who read love novels», lived since 1997 in Gijón, a city where he was well known for having promoted and directed, among other projects, the Ibero-American Book Fair. (C.D.A.)
SOURCE: DW
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