Writers from Guayaquil - Ecuadorian Literature

Ana Cecilia Blum

Ana Cecilia Blum (Guayaquil, March 17, 1972) is an Ecuadorian poet, essayist, fiction writer, editor, translator and journalist. She studied political and social sciences at the Vicente Rocafuerte Secular University in Guayaquil. She earned a postgraduate degree in “Teaching Spanish as a Foreign Language” from Colorado State University (U.S.). She is the founder and editor-in-chief of the digital magazine Metaforología which publishes poetry, fiction and essays. She currently lives between Ecuador and the United States. Some of her work has been translated into English, French, Italian and Portuguese.

Zaida Letty Castillo

Zaida Letty Castillo de Saavedra (Guayaquil, February 5, 1890 – Guayaquil, July 30, 1977) was an Ecuadorian poet. She hailed from a family of journalists and writers. She wrote under the pseudonym Djenana, which she adopted from a character in “Les Désenchantées,” a French novel by Pierre Loti. She published her works in “El Telegrafo Literario,” a literary supplement of the newspaper El Telégrafo, owned by her family. She also directed the supplement “La mujer y el Arte” of the Peruvian newspaper “El Comercio,” as well as other publications in Ecuador and Venezuela. She was a founder of the Guayas branch of the House of Ecuadorian Culture and her poetry appears in several anthologies of Latin American poetry.

Mario Campaña

Mario Campaña Avilés (Guayaquil, 1959) is an Ecuadorian poet, biographer, essayist and anthologist of poetry. He founded and directed the Latin American cultural magazine Guaraguao in Barcelona for 22 years, until 2018. In 2018 he published, “Poesía Reunida 1988-2018,” a compilation of all his published poems up to that time. He has also authored literary biographies on Francisco de Quevedo and Baudelaire. He has lived in Barcelona, Spain since 1992.

Piedad Romo-Leroux Girón

Piedad Romo-Leroux Girón (Guayaquil) is an Ecuadorian psychiatrist, university professor, and well-known children’s author with 56 volumes to her credit, including poetry, fiction, essays, and plays. From 1970 to 2008, she was the Chief Doctor of the Children’s Ward at the Lorenzo Ponce Psychiatric Hospital; from 2008 to 2010, she supervised the hospital’s Academic Council; and from 2010 to 2011, she directed the Santa Rosa Women’s Ward.

Jaime Damerval

Jaime Francisco Damerval Martinez (Guayaquil, November 19, 1940) is a lawyer, poet, essayist, journalist, columnist, university professor, political scientist, politician, former minister of the interior (2004) and former presidential candidate of Ecuador (2006). His poetry books include “Racimos” (1975) and “Mazorca” (1981). He also authored two book-length political essays: “Centralismo y regionalismo en el Ecuador” (1979) and “Monopolio político en el Ecuador” (2000), as well as collections of journalistic articles. He was an opinion columnist for the daily newspaper El Universo for over 20 years. In 2014 he became a member of the Guayaquil chapter of the Ecuadorian Academy of History.

Juan Eusebio Molestina

Juan Eusebio Molestina Matheus (Guayaquil, 1850 – ?) was an Ecuadorian poet and playwright known for his poetic dramas. His dramatic career crossed the year 1895 which marked the end of romanticism and the beginning of modernism in Ecuador. Molestina’s play Espinas y abrojos (Thistles and Thorns), performed in Guayaquil in 1898, exemplifies the theater known as criollista and is considered as a precursor of the realist and social theater.

Francisco J. Falquez Ampuero

Francisco José Falquez Ampuero (Guayaquil, April 17, 1877 – Guayaquil, March 23, 1947) was an Ecuadorian poet, lawyer, diplomat, prosecutor, prose writer and French to Spanish translator. He was appointed Governor of León Province by President Eloy Alfaro (his godfather) and held various other public posts. His rich and extensive literary production includes verse, fiction and journalism. His sonnet collection, Gobelinos (1919), received praise from critics and literati, and is regarded as his best work. He participated in the movements that culminated in the bloody Revolution of November 15, 1922, hence the government of President José Luis Tamayo (1920 – 1924) ordered his exile to Lima, Peru, where he remained until 1923. He then returned to Guayaquil to practice law.

Miguel Valverde

Miguel Valverde Letamendi (Guayaquil, December 6, 1852 – Rome, April 19, 1920) was an Ecuadorian politician, diplomat, writer, poet, journalist and translator. He is considered a precursor of modernismo in Ecuador. In 1890 he was the Director of the Municipal Library of Guayaquil. In 1915 he published “Libro de versos,” containing a translation of Victor Hugo’s “Religions et religion,” a political tract supporting belief in God but attacking organized religion, which caused a scandal among followers of the church. Due to his political views he was often arrested and many times exiled. He also served the country in various governmental posts during the presidencies of his allies. In 1883, General Eloy Alfaro appointed him Minister of the Interior, War and Foreign Relations of the Governments of Manabí and Esmeraldas. In 1901, General Leonidas Plaza appointed him Minister of the Interior and Police.

Miguel E. Neira

Miguel E. Neira was a modernist poet and journalist from Guayaquil, Ecuador. He became well-known with his 1907 book “Baladas de la Miseria” (Misery Ballads). His works were published in magazines like “Alto Relieves” and “El Guante,” a publication he helped to found. Transitioning to public administration, Neira eventually stepped back from the literary world. However, his literary efforts, especially through “El Guante,” significantly shaped modernist literature in Ecuador and supported the country’s intellectual independence from Spain.

Victor Hugo Escala

Victor Hugo Escala Camacho (Guayaquil, June 29, 1887 – April 30, 1964) was a poet, journalist, historian and diplomat. Along with Enrique Baquerizo Moreno and Manuel J. Calle, in 1907 he plotted an uprising against General Eloy Alfaro, which led to his imprisonment and exile. Upon returning to Guayaquil in 1909, he went to work for the literary section of El Telégrafo newspaper. His first poetry book “Motivos Galantes,” was published in Chile in 1915. After the 1918 armistice, he traveled to Paris where the great poet Ernesto Noboa y Caamaño served as his guide. One night they were invited to lunch at Gonzalo Zaldumbide‘s house, and the latter urged him to write. The outcome was “Kaleidoscope,” (1922) a travel journal with prints and landscapes of Europe and the East.

Emilio Gallegos del Campo

Emilio Gallegos del Campo (Guayaquil, September 20, 1875 – May 15, 1914) was a poet, playwright, journalist and diplomat. In 1898 General Eloy Alfaro, who was a friend of his family and called him “Emilito,” appointed him Consul of Ecuador in London, a post which he held until 1901. In Europe, he was decorated by the French government with the Legion of Honor. Together with his brother, he founded several newspapers, including “América Modernista,” which published poets of the modernismo movement. His brother was the poet Joaquín Gallegos Del Campo whose son was the celebrated novelist Joaquin Gallegos Lara.

Adolfo Hidalgo Nevares

Adolfo Hidalgo Nevares, sometimes spelled Nevarez, (Guayaquil, March 18, 1891 – Quito, 1934) was a doctor, writer and poet. Under the pseudonym Máximo de Bretal he wrote articles for El Guante magazine on topics such as politics, literature and poetry. He also wrote for El Telégrafo of Guayaquil and El Universitario of Quito. In 1920 he was appointed Deputy of Guayas. In 1925 he became a professor at the University of Guayaquil’s new Dentistry and Veterinary schools, and in 1926 he was named Minister of Public Education. He led a bohemian life and had an on and off again addiction to morphine which he sometimes used in the company of some of the members of the Decapitated Generation, a group of young Ecuadorian poets who died young by suicide. He too died by suicide in 1934, at the age of 43.

Nicolás Augusto González

Nicolás Augusto González Tola, also N.A. González (Guayaquil, April 14, 1858 – Buenos Aires, Argentina, January 18, 1918) was an Ecuadorian writer, playwright, novelist, journalist, poet, historian and diplomat. His plays in verse are among his best known works, which include, “Hojas secas,” “Entre el amor y el honor,” and “Amor y Patria,” which he co-wrote with Alfredo Baquerizo Moreno (President of Ecuador from 1916-1920). “Cuestión Histórica, el Asesinato del Gran Mariscal Ayacucho,” (written between 1887 and 1889), is perhaps his most important and controversial work, in which he accuses General Juan José Flores of being behind the assassination of Antonio José de Sucre, prompting hatred and persecution from Flores’ son Antonio Flores Jijón (President of Ecuador from 1888-1892). Due to his political views and polemic writing he was exiled to other countries, such as Peru, Colombia, Guatemala and Spain. From 1908-1913 he lived in Spain as a diplomat, and published there his poetry book, “Humo y cenizas” (1908) and his novel “La Llaga” (1908). He returned to Guayaquil in 1917 where a special committee chaired by José Luis Tamayo (President of Ecuador from 1920-1924) awarded him the “Golden Lyre”.

Miguel Ángel Granado Guarnizo

Miguel Ángel Granado Guarnizo, aka M.A. Granado Guarnizo (Guayaquil, 1895-1955) was an Ecuadorian modernist poet, playwright and literary critic. The majority of his poems were published between 1912-1916 in literary magazines such as “Letras” and “El Telegrafo Literario”, which, along with M.E. Castillo y Castillo and J. A. Falconí Villagómez, he founded, directed and edited. His best known play is “El Hermano Cándido” (1919). As a literary critic, in 1920 he published an important critical essay on his friend Medardo Ángel Silva’s poetry book, “El árbol del bien y del mal.” A few critics have grouped him in the so-called “Decapitated Generation,” a group of Ecuadorian poets with premature, tragic endings. He stopped publishing his works in 1926, the year in which he was diagnosed with a mental illness, due to which he spent the rest of his life admitted to a psychiatric hospital. He was the brother of the poet Carlos F. Granado Guarnizo.

José Antonio Falconí Villagómez

José Antonio Falconí Villagómez, aka Jose A. Falconí Villagómez or J.A. Falconí Villagómez, (Guayaquil, May 26, 1894 – Guayaquil, 1967) was an Ecuadorian poet, literary critic, translator, and medical doctor. In 1910 he began publishing his poems in the magazine El Guante, and by 1913 in El Telégrafo. In 1916 he founded the magazine Renacimiento, in which he published his poem, “Ruth adora a los cisnes.” He was greatly influenced by the French Symbolists of his time and was a champion of the avant-garde in poetry. In 1921 he published, “Arte Poética nº 2,” a dadaist poem which introduced the European avant-garde into Ecuadorian letters. In 1953 he was designated a Member of the House of Ecuadorian Culture. In 1964 he was decorated with the National Order of Merit, and in 1965 the city of Guayaquil conferred on him the Gold Medal of Literary Merit.