Poets - Ecuadorian Literature

Hugo Salazar Tamariz

Hugo Salazar Tamariz (Cuenca, September 2, 1923 – Guayaquil, January 31, 1999) was a poet, novelist, playwright and actor. After traveling extensively throughout America, Europe, Asia and Africa, he moved to Guayaquil in 1940 where he lived most of his life and taught literature and drama at the university. He wrote several novels and books of short stories. In 1968 he published 3 plays in one volume entitled “Teatro,” which included “La falsa muerte de un ciclista,” “Toque de queda,” and “Por un plato de arroz.” In 2008, a complete collection of his poems was published posthumously under the eponymous title “Hugo Salazar Tamariz: poesía completa.“

César E. Arroyo

César E. Arroyo (Quito, 1887 – Cádiz, 1937) was an Ecuadorian poet, novelist, journalist, playwright and diplomat. He was Ecuador’s Consul in Vigo from 1912 to 1916, and Ecuador’s Consul in Madrid from 1917 to 1919. He later served as Consul in Santander and Cadiz. He co-founded the Madrid-based magazine Cervantes (1913-1921) with the Spanish poet Francisco Villaespesa.

Ney Yépez Cortés

Ney Yépez Cortés (Quito, 1968) is an Ecuadorian novelist, poet, journalist, songwriter, screenwriter, lecturer, and teacher of Tai Chi, Reiki and Qi Gong. He is best known as a science fiction, adventure and mystery writer. He published his first poems in 1990 in Ixo Facto, a surrealist literary magazine. He has since written 5 novels and 3 books of short stories. In 2001 he published his first book of short stories entitled “Mundos abiertos,” which was critically acclaimed. In 2006 he published his first novel “Las sombras de la Casa Mitre,” and 2009 he published its sequel “El árbol de las brujas.” His latest novel “El secreto de la reliquia sagrada,” a work of adventure and mystery, was published in 2019.

Pedro Jorge Vera

Pedro Jorge Vera (Guayaquil, June 16, 1914 – Guayaquil, March 5, 1999) was an Ecuadorian journalist, novelist, short story writer, playwright, poet, university professor, and a politician from the Communist Party of Ecuador. He published and contributed to several controversial newspapers and magazines, such as “La Calle”, with the writer Alejandro Carrión, and “La Mañana”. He remained throughout his life a close friend of Cuban president Fidel Castro. Vera was the paternal uncle of Prima Ballerina Noralma Vera Arrata.

Juan Andrade Heymann

Juan Andrade Heymann (Quito, December 18, 1945) is an Ecuadorian writer, novelist, short story writer, poet, and playwright. His short story El lagarto en la mano (1965) and his novel Las tertulias de San Li Tun (1993) expressed social change.

Sonia Romo Verdesoto

Sonia Romo Verdesoto de Augustín is an Ecuadorian poet and diplomat. She was the only female member of the Tzantzismo movement in Ecuador during the 1960s. Verdesoto served as the Ecuadorian consul to Haiti.

Role in Tzantzismo

Sonia Romo Verdesoto was interviewed by Susana Freire García for the book Tzantzismo: tierno e insolente (2008; Tzantzismo: Tender and Insolent), where she discussed her role in the movement and its influence and effects on Ecuadorian culture

Works

Ternura del aire (1963).

Aleyda Quevedo Rojas

Aleyda Quevedo Rojas (Quito, 1972) is an Ecuadorian poet and journalist. She is regarded as an important voice in contemporary Latin American poetry. Among her best-known works are the poems “Algunas rosas verdes” (1996), for which she won that year’s Jorge Carrera Andrade Award, and “Soy mi cuerpo” (2006), in which she uses the human figure as an escape from the fears and anguish provoked by death. The latter book and another one, “Jardín de dagas” (2013), were translated into French. In 2017, the House of Ecuadorian Culture published the book “Cierta manera de la luz sobre el cuerpo,” a compilation of her poems up to that point.

María Piedad Castillo de Levi

María Piedad Castillo de Levi (Guayaquil, July 6, 1888 – Quito, March 4, 1962) was an Ecuadorian writer, poet, journalist, and feminist. She fought for women’s suffrage and co-founded Nuevos Horizontes, a feminist magazine. Castillo studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and later worked for El Telégrafo Literario. A delegate to the Inter-American Commission of Women from 1940, she also joined the House of Ecuadorian Culture and traveled widely, contributing to international media. In 1962, her poetry collection Poemas de Ayer y de Hoy was published.

María Clara Sharupi Jua

María Clara Sharupi Jua (Morona Santiago, 1964) is an Ecuadorian writer, poet, and translator, who writes in Spanish and Shuar, an indigenous language of Ecuador’s Amazon basin. She writes poetry in Shuar, while translating it into Spanish in order to reach a wider audience. She co-wrote the book “Amanece en nuestras vidas” (2011), the first anthology of poetry from Ecuadorian indigeneous women writers, and wrote the short story collection “Tarimiat” (2019), which was written in Shuar, Spanish, and English. Sharupi Jua also works as a translator and radio and television presenter in Shuar and Spanish. She was a member of the translation team that worked on the official Shuar translation of Ecuador’s Constitution. She lives in Quito, where she has also worked for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Migration on indigenous issues.

Karina Galvez

Karina Galvez (Guayaquil, July 7, 1964) is an award-winning poet with Ecuadorian and American citizenship. She has lived in Orange County, California since 1985. In 1995, she published her book “Karina Gálvez – Poesía y Cantares”[Karina Galvez – Poetry and Songs], which includes both English and Spanish versions of her poems with a prologue written by León Roldós Aguilera, Ecuador’s former vice president. She is also a songwriter and author of children’s poems and short stories. Her Spanish poems have been translated into English, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Bulgarian, Slovene, and Czech.

María Fernanda Espinosa

María Fernanda Espinosa Garcés (b. September 7, 1964, Salamanca, Spain) is an Ecuadorian politician, diplomat, writer, and poet affiliated with the political party PAIS Alliance. She holds the distinction of being the first woman to serve as Ecuador’s minister of national defense, the first woman to be appointed as Ecuador’s permanent representative to the United Nations in New York, and the first Latina woman to be elected as president of the UN General Assembly. Prior to her political and diplomatic career, she was an Associate Professor and Researcher at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO). Ms. Espinosa Garcés is also a prolific writer and poet, having published over 30 academic articles on various topics such as the Amazon River, culture, heritage, climate change, and foreign policy, among others. She has authored five volumes of poetry and was awarded the Ecuadorian National Poetry Prize in 1990.

Luz Elisa Borja Martínez

Luz Elisa Borja Martínez (Riobamba, May 15, 1903 – Riobamba, July 10, 1927) was an Ecuadorian poet, pianist, painter, and sculptor. In only 24 years of life, she amassed an extensive body of written work, which her brother Luis Alberto published after her death in two books titled “Cofre Romántico” and “La Bella Durmiente.” The second book contains the poem “Quiero Llorar” (I Mourn), which she wrote in 1918, at the age of 15, after the death of the mother superior of the Riobamba Sisters of Charity. It has seven stanzas, two of which became the lyrics for the Ecuadorian pasillo called “Lamparilla.” The music was composed by Miguel Ángel Casares Viteri, who was inspired by Borja’s poem and his dismay over the damage caused by a Chanchán River flood. Some of her original works can be found at the House of Ecuadorian Culture in Chimborazo.

Rosa Amelia Alvarado

Rosa Amelia Alvarado Roca (1944, Guayaquil) is an Ecuadorian writer and poet. In 1964 she founded the Guayaquil-based magazine Hogar, which became the biggest women’s magazine line in Ecuador. From 1967 to 1972, she worked in television as the director of programming at Channel 2 in Guayaquil, specializing in the creation of cultural programs. She is the president of the Guayas branch of the House of Ecuadorian Culture, and is a member of the Ecuadorian Academy of Language. Her most notable poems include: “Añoranza,” “Cosas Absurdas,” “De lo profano (II),” “El sermón de la montaña” and “La vida va y viene.”

José Joaquín de Olmedo

José Joaquín de Olmedo y Maruri (Guayaquil, March 20, 1780 – Guayaquil, February 19, 1847) was a notable Ecuadorian poet, first mayor of Guayaquil, and former president of Ecuador. In his poetry, Olmedo emphasized patriotic themes. His best-known work is La victoria de Junín: Canto a Bolívar (1825; “The Victory at Junín: Song to Bolívar”), which commemorates the decisive battle won there by the forces of the liberator Simón Bolívar against the Spanish armies. It is considered by many critics the finest example of heroic poetry written in Spanish America.

Dolores Veintimilla

Ignacia María de los Dolores Veintimilla de Galindo (Quito, July 12, 1829 – Cuenca, May 23, 1857) was an Ecuadorian poet and essayist known for her contributions to 19th-century Romanticism and early feminist thought. Raised in an aristocratic family, she received a formal education and later married Colombian physician Sixto Galindo. Her poetry, marked by themes of sorrow, unrequited love, and social justice, reflected her personal struggles and progressive views, including her opposition to the death penalty. Isolated and vilified for her outspokenness, Veintimilla tragically took her own life at the age of 27.