The directory «Plots»

Gil Gilbert Enrique
(1912—1973)

Enrique Gil Gilbert was an Ecuadorian novelist, journalist, poet, and a high-ranking member of the Communist Party of Ecuador.

Gil Gilbert was born and died in the coastal city of Guayaquil, and was the youngest member of the Guayaquil Group, which was one of the most renowned literary and intellectual groups in Ecuador in 1930-1940.

Gil Gilbert’s most famous novel is Nuestro Pan (Our Daily Bread) (1942), which was translated into English (1943), German, Japanese, and Czech.

Critics and historians agree that the Guayaquil Group emerged with the publication of Los que se van, cuentos del cholo y del motuvio (The Vanishing Ones. Stories about the Cholo and the Montuvio) (1930), a social realist book of 34 short stories by Demetrio Aguilera Malta, Joaquín Gallegos Lara, and Enrique Gil Gilbert, that dealt with the lives of the coastal peasant of Ecuador. It marked a whole new type of literature in Ecuador, which until then had been characterized by Romanticism and Modernism.

Their writing featured: a socialist-inspired expose of social-economic abuses; a literature rooted in popular culture; Freudianism; a grotesque vision of the world; and a concern with anthropology and indigenous culture. The Guayaquil Group is considered a forerunner of magical realism.

Ecuador, 2012, Enrique Gil Gilbert