Extract from a novel by a Chilean exile Antonio Skármeta was born in the northern Chilean city of Antofagasta in 1940. He studied Philosophy, Literature, and Theatrical Direction at the University of Chile in Santiago and at Columbia University in New York. He left Chile for exile in West Germany in 1975, and now lives in Berlin. Skármeta is one of Chile's most successful novelists and short story and screenplay writers. His first collection of stories, El entusiasmo ( Enthusiasm') was published in Chile in 1967, while the second, Desnudo en el tejado ( ‘Naked on the Tiled Roof’) won the prestigious Casa de las Americas prize two years later. He has written four novels apart from Soñé que la nieve ardia (‘I Dreamt the Snow was Burning’). One of them, Chileno!, is for young people and deals with the life of a teenage Chilean exile in Berlin. Among his film credits are three films made with the German director, Peter Lilienthal. In 1983, Skármeta himself won a series of prizes, among them awards at the Festivals of Biarritz and Huelva, as director of Ardiente Paciencia (‘Burning Patience’), a film based on his own play about an imaginary incident in the life of Pablo Neruda. I Dreamt the Snow Was Burning was published in 1981. Described by one critic as a ‘ballad’, it deals with the fortunes of a group of residents of a Santiago boarding house in the last months of the Popular Unity government which was overthrown by General Pinochet's coup in September 1973. Among these characters are Arturo, an aspiring footballer, and Señor Lecaros, the ‘Small Gent’, a circusperformer who spends his time in a dreamworld. In the opening sequence of the novel the two meet while travelling to the capital, Santiago, from the south. With highly colloquial language (the Spanish-language original of the novel contains a lengthy glossary of ‘Chileanisms’ to aid the reader), the story traces the aspirations, illusions and fates of the residents, and their conscious or inadvertent involvement in the events of the time. (Two words of explanation. Momios or ‘mummies’ — of the Egyptian kind — means ‘reactionaries’, while ‘turks’ refers to the considerable Syrian-Lebanese community which owns shops and factories throughout Chile.) An English version of I Dreamt the Snow was Burning will be published in the USA, UK and Canada by Readers International, 8 Strathray Gardens, London NW3.