Demetrio Aguilera Malta (Guayaquil, 1909 - México D.F., 1981) was an Ecuadorian writer, director, painter, and diplomat. His literary work was based on social reality.
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Aguilera Malta was born on May 24, 1909 in Guayaquil, Ecuador. He was the son of Demetrio Aguilera Sánchez and Teresa Malta y Franco, who named him Raúl Demetrio. During his youth, he stopped using Raúl on the advice of Joaquín Gallegos Lara. His father was a businessman who owned factories and farms. His maternal great-grandfather, Juan José de Malta y Salcedo, was a playwright, and the young Aguilera Malta discovered his works in the library he inherited from his grandfather. Aguilera Malta spent much of his childhood on his family's farm on an island in the Gulf of Guayaquil. He was home-schooled by his mother and tutors. He went to high school at Vicente Rocafuerte School, from which he graduated in 1929. José de la Cuadra was his literature teacher. At the beginning of his college education, he studied law in Guayaquil, but he quit these studies in 1931. Later, he studied literature on a Ministry of Education scholarship in Ecuador and in Madrid, just before the start of the Spanish Civil War.
Among other posts, Aguilera Malta was Undersecretary of Education and charge d'affaires in the Ecuadorian Embassy in Chile in 1947 under the government of Carlos Julio Arosemena Tola. Later, he was Cultural Attache in Brazil in 1949 and Ambassador of Ecuador to Mexico from August 1979 until his death in 1982.
He held conferences and courses at several universities in North and South America, including Clermont University and Irving University in Los Angeles.
He was a war correspondent during the Spanish Civil War. He worked for La Prensa and El Telégrafo in Guayaquil. He also worked for El Diario de Panamá, El Gráfico, and La Estrella de Panamá (all in Panama).
Aguilera Malta is considered one of the most important Ecuadorian writers. He was a founding member of the Ecuadorian House of Culture and of the Guayaquil Group (together with his best friend Joaquín Gallegos Lara), of the Iberoamerican Community of Writers, and of the Latin American House of Culture. His books have been published around the world and translated into several languages.
A number of studies have been done of his works, including:
Aguilera Malta moved to Mexico in 1958. He had one son, Ciro, with his first love. With the Panamanian Ana Rosa Endara he had two daughters, Ada Teresa y Marlene. He was with Velia Marqués beginning in 1950, but they had no children.
Aguilera Malta suffered from diabetes and blindness since the early eighties. He died on December 28, 1981 in Mexico City, due to a stroke after a fall.
In the 1930 Art Salon, he won two awards. In 1971, he received a gold medal from the Municipality of Guayaquil during the Latin American Writers Meeting. He was awarded the Eugenio Espejo Prize in 1981 in recognition of his outstanding literary career.
In 1954, Aguilera Malta filmed four documentaries commissioned by the Ministry of Public Works to promote Ecuador.