Vladimiro Ariel Dorfman was born on May 6,1942 and is an Argentine-Chilean-American novelist, playwright, essayist, academic, and human rights activist.
13 Facts About Ariel Dorfman
2.
Ariel Dorfman attended and later worked as a professor at the University of Chile, marrying Angelica Malinarich in 1966 and becoming a Chilean citizen in 1967.
3.
From 1970 to 1973, Ariel Dorfman served as a cultural adviser to President Salvador Allende.
4.
Ariel Dorfman was supposed to work on the night shift at the La Moneda presidential palace the night before the Pinochet coup, but he had swapped his shift with his friend Claudio Jimeno, not knowing what was to come.
5.
Ariel Dorfman was a member of the Group of 88, a group of signatories of a controversial advertisement in The Chronicle, Duke's student newspaper during the Duke lacrosse case.
6.
Ariel Dorfman identified "the stark, painful Chilean transition to democracy" as Death and the Maiden's central theme.
7.
Ariel Dorfman's works have been translated into more than 40 languages and performed in over 100 countries.
8.
Ariel Dorfman has won various international awards, including two Kennedy Center Theater Awards.
9.
Ariel Dorfman's poems, collected in Last Waltz in Santiago and In Case of Fire in a Foreign Land, have been turned into a half-hour fictional film, Deadline, featuring the voices of Emma Thompson, Bono, Harold Pinter, and others.
10.
Ariel Dorfman is the subject of a feature-length documentary, A Promise to the Dead: The Exile Journey of Ariel Dorfman, based on his memoir Heading South, Looking North and directed by Peter Raymont.
11.
Ariel Dorfman currently has several film projects in development with his sons, Rodrigo and Joaquin Ariel Dorfman, including a screen adaptation of his novel, Blake's Therapy.
12.
Ariel Dorfman writes regularly for such publications as The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Le Monde and L'Unita.
13.
Ariel Dorfman is a member of L'Academie Universelle des Cultures, in Paris, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.