Ariel Dorfman is a writer who teaches at Duke University and holds fellowships at Universities worldwide. His latest books are Desert Memories: Journeys through the Chilean North (National Geographic Directions, Longitude, 2003 ), the essay-collection Other Septembers, Many Americas (Pluto, 2004), and Burning City (Random House, 2006), a novel written with his youngest son, Joaquin.

Recent articles

As millions gather to witness the Polish pope’s Rome burial, Ariel Dorfman recalls the five minutes in Chile that define his life’s paradox.

…has words from the other side of death for Donald Rumsfeld. Baghdad fell to a terrible echo - the smashing and pillaging of the priceless artefacts of its ancient civilisation. Across 3,800 years, the greatest law-giver of its Babylonian ancestor sends this fierce message to its latest conqueror

...who rebaptised Saddam International Airport as his troops rolled into it. The peremptory renaming of the main airport in Iraq’s capital city by its occupier from across the ocean stirs a centuries-old adventurer from his restless tomb.

Novelist and Playwright Dorfman wrote these words on the brink of a destructive war in the Gulf, where President Bush’s US forces squared up to those of Saddam Hussein. That they were written twelve years ago, on the brink of the first Gulf War, but not even the names have changed, is a chilling example of history repeating.

When the United States secretary of state presented his case against Iraq at the United Nations Security Council on 5 February, the tapestry of Guernica that routinely hangs there was covered up. This symbolic denial of a supreme artistic response to war moved Ariel Dorfman to poetry.