Elena Castedo

Elena Castedo wrote her first novel, Paradise, after she had become a grandmother, and in an adopted language, English. To her great surprise, it became a critical success, a finalist for the National Book Award and required reading in many university English departments. Her own self-translation into Spanish, published in five countries, won Chile’s Book of the Year award and was a best seller in Spain and Chile for a year.

Castedo has published fiction and non-fiction books, a play, articles, short stories, often anthologized and read on National Public Radio, and poetry in publications such as The Afro-American Review, The New York Times, Prairie Schooner, etc. She’s included in the literatures of the U.S., Spain and Chile. By virtue of having been born in Barcelona she’s also listed in the Encyclopedia of Outstanding Catalans. She was the editor of the Inter-American Review of Bibliography, a trilingual scholarly quarterly, and has taught courses, seminars and lectured at more than 54 universities.

Castedo was born in Spain, was a refugee in France, then later in Chile. She was the editor of her high school paper in Santiago, and the first female to run for student body president. She lost. She did volunteer work in literacy programs and at Mi Casa orphanage, and organized a group to help homeless children. As a gofer for a group of researchers, she traveled for over a year by car, train, boat and plane through most of the countries in the American Continent, from Argentina to Canada and back to Chile.

At eighteen she became top-paid fashion model in Chile. She majored in literature at the Catholic University of Chile. After her sophomore year she won a scholarship to travel to the U.S. and through some very odd circumstances, ended up getting married in Reno, Nevada when she was underage and spoke very little English. Her husband turned out to be an abusive alcoholic and gambler, and threatened to kill her if she left him. Thus started many years of struggle to stay above poverty. She sought only jobs that permitted her to keep her children with her. In California she worked as a fashion runway and TV model, face-cast model for store mannequins, demonstrator of electrical appliances, nursery school attendant, door-to-door salesperson and private tutor. She took one or two courses a semester at Sacramento State College (now University) and at UCLA.

Her husband died in 1965, leaving debts and no insurance. Disregarding advice, she didn’t go on welfare. In New Haven, CT. she worked for a government agency as social visitor, taught dance to children, tutored at a grammar school and sold a cleaner door-to-door. Everything she and her children owned came from trash cans or charity sales.

She received scholarships that permitted her to go back to school and earn a college degree, which she did with honors, then a Master’s degree from UCLA, where she won the Best Masters Student in the Humanities award, and a Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures from Harvard University. She received a grant from Harvard’s Latin-American Studies Program to do research in Chile.

She moved to Aix-en-Provence, France, where she remarried, and then to Paris, where she had another child. When her husband was appointed Counselor for Economic Affairs at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, she and the children moved to Vietnam. After “the fall of Saigon” she moved briefly to Hong-Kong and Taiwan, and traveled with her children to Japan. She lives in Cambridge, MA; Key West, FL; Paris, France and Madrid, Spain with her husband. Her biggest pride are her fourteen-with their spouses-children and grandchildren.

Her community work includes the Johnson presidential and Bradley Mayoral campaigns in California in the 1960s; volunteer for Chile Foundation for needy children; various "help the libraries" programs; talks to schools with minority students and to immigrant women in various U.S. cities and organizing neighborhood groups.

She's now working on her third novel.