Sergio Badilla Castillo

Sergio Badilla Castillo, born in Valparaíso in 1947, is a Chilean poet, journalist and academic who writes in Spanish. He founded poetic transrealism, a current that mixes the imagined with the immediate perception of reality. Although much of his life took place outside Chile, his work belongs to contemporary Spanish-language poetry and carries a strong Nordic imprint.

He studied journalism at the University of Chile in Valparaíso between 1968 and 1972, and later social anthropology at Stockholm University. As a student he came into contact with poets from his home city and with the Chilean poetry groups of the sixties. After the military coup of 1973 he went into exile, which took him to Argentina, Romania and Sweden. In Buenos Aires, a city he had known as a child during long stays at his grandmother's house, he formed a friendship with the painter Luis Felipe Noé. He settled in Bucharest in 1975 and moved to Stockholm in 1976, where he would live for almost two decades.

In Sweden he worked as a culture journalist for Radio Sweden International and for the Panorama programme of Sveriges Radio, from 1980 to 1993, and he was part of the Grupo Taller de Estocolmo. There he published much of his early work and founded the magazines Polo Norte and Pasión. His poetry from that period draws on Nordic mythology and on Finnish and Swedish writers such as Gunnar Ekelöf, Tomas Tranströmer and Paavo Haavikko. His main subjects are the cosmogonic myths of northern Europe, often set beside figures from everyday life. After returning to Chile in 1993 his writing became more autobiographical, and in later books he built an almost dreamlike world in which time and dimensions shift.

He is also known as a translator of Swedish, Finnish and English poetry. His legacy lies in bringing the imprint of Nordic lyric poetry into Spanish and in giving a name to a movement of his own, transrealism, which has found readers in several countries.