Augusto d’Halmar

He left a seminary for literature, then carried Chilean prose through ports, consulates, war reporting, and years of travel.

Augusto d’Halmar was born Augusto Goemine Thomson in Santiago in 1882 and grew up in Valparaíso. He published his first novel, Juana Lucero, in 1902 and helped found the Tolstoyan Colony with Fernando Santiván and Julio Ortiz de Zárate in 1904. Diplomatic service took him to India and Peru; later he lived in Paris and Spain, writing fiction, travel books, journalism, and chronicles shaped by the places he crossed. His works include Nirvana, La sombra del humo en el espejo, La lámpara en el molino, and Pasión y muerte del cura Deusto. Back in Chile, he worked at the National Library and directed the Valparaíso Museum of Fine Arts. In 1942 he became the first recipient of Chile’s National Prize for Literature. He died in Santiago in 1950.

The wandering became a method: distance let him write about the desires and identities that polite society preferred not to name.