Enrique Gil Gilbert

Gil Gilberto spent fifteen months in prison under the government of the military junta of 1963. While in prison, law enforcement ransacked his home, and his wife had to flee into exile in Chile, while his children went into hiding. They burned many of his papers and books, including a completed but unpublished book, manuscripts of unfinished works, thus many of his writings were lost forever.

Gil Gilberto was a registered member of the Communist Party of Ecuador. In 1944 he traveled to Moscow in his capacity as Secretary General of the Regional Committee of the Communist Party of Ecuador. He was persecuted for his socialist and militant ideas, and in 1935, under the dictatorship of Federico Paez, he lost his teaching job at the Rocafuerte School in Guayaquil.

Gil Gilbert’s most famous novel is Nuestro Pan (Our Daily Bread) (1942), which was translated into English (1943), German, Japanese, and Czech. The novel won Honourable Mention in the Latin-American Prize Novel Competition.

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 1930–40.

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.

Enrique Gil Gilbert (July 8, 1912 – February 21, 1973) was an Ecuadorian novelist, journalist, poet, and a high-ranking member of the Communist Party of Ecuador.