Writers living outside of Ecuador - Ecuadorian Literature

Margarita Borja

Margarita Borja (Quito, 1983) is an Ecuadorian writer, journalist, translator, and literary critic. She has lived in Leipzip, Germany since 2007, where her daughters were born and raised. Since 2012 she has written an international opinion column for the Ecuadorian newspaper El Universo. In 2015, she published a collection of 32 of her opinion columns as a book, “Una latina en Alemania: historias de dos mundos” [A Latina in Germany: Stories of Two Worlds]. Her articles have appeared in numerous publications.

Arturo Montesinos Malo

Arturo Montesinos Malo (Cuenca, August 31, 1913 – May 23, 2009) was an Ecuadorian novelist, professor, and translator who lived in the United States for many years where he worked as a translator at the United Nations in New York. In 1959, he received the “José de la Cuadra” Award for his short story collection “Arcilla indócil,” which is considered by many to be his best work. Some of his Spanish-to-English translations of contemporary writers’ short stories and poems appeared in Letras del Ecuador.

Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

Karla Cornejo Villavicencio (1989) is a writer from Ecuador. In 2020 she published, “The Undocumented Americans,” which was among Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2020, it was also a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Writing for The New York Times, Caitlin Dickerson called the book “captivating and evocative.” Cornejo graduated from Harvard in 2011, becoming the first undocumented immigrant to do so. She was an Emerson Collective fellow, and as of September 2020 is a Ph.D. candidate in the American studies program at Yale. Her articles have been published in The Atlantic, Elle, Glamour, n+1, The New Republic, The New York Times, and Vogue.

George Reyes

George Reyes (Los Ríos, Ecuador, 1960) is an Ecuadorian poet, essayist, editor, theology professor, and pastor. He has been a permanent resident of Mexico for many years. He has a bachelor’s degree in theology, two master’s degrees in theology, and is a PhD candidate in theology. He is the author of two books on Biblical hermeneutics and co-author of two books on theology. He’s also the author of two poetry collections, “El azul de la tarde” (2015) and “Ese otro exilio, esa otra patria” (2016). He is listed in Mexico’s Encyclopedia of 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.

Yanna Hadatty

Yanna Hadatty Mora (Guayaquil, 1969) is an Ecuadorian essayist and short story writer. Haddatty has lived in Mexico since 1992, where she finished her higher education and worked as a professor. She received her doctorate in Ibero-American Literature from the Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), where she later worked as a professor and contemporary literature researcher. She also taught at the University of Sor Juana Cloister and the UAM Xochimilco. She is a full member of Ecuador’s House of Culture and the Executive Secretary of the Association of Ecuadorians in Mexico. She has been a member of Mexico’s National System of Researchers since 2005.

Tamara Cadena (pen name Judesty)

Tamara Cadena, pen name Judesty (Quito, 1967) is an Ecuadorian writer. She has received several national and international awards and recognitions. In 2009, Cadena’s first novel El acuerdo (2008) won first prize in the online literary contest of El Corte Inglés and BookAndYou.com. Cadena’s third and latest novel El tiempo roto (2017) was well-received by critics. She has lived in Spain since she was thirteen. Cadena publishes her books under the pseudonym Judesty.