Beatriz García Huidobro holds a degree in Pedagogy, a post graduate in Psychopedagogy and a MA in Literature. She has worked as a professor, writer and editor. As a writer she has published from adults novels to children and young adults' books.
Over the years she has also worked as a literary critic, recommending books every week on the radio program “Vuelan las Plumas” and writing monthly literary posts for the newspaper Mensaje. She has also participated as a judge in different book competitions.
There are many reviews, articles of literary criticism and interviews focused on Beatriz’s work. Among them, favourable critical studies by the renowned Chilean writers Diamela Eltit and Sergio Missana, and by literary critics in the US, such as José Promis, José Manuel Vial, Carlos Labbé and Jaime Concha.
Mystery in Patagonia / Mystery in Los Piñones / Mystery in the Camp / Mystery in La Tirana
A saga starring two children who in each volume are faced with solving a different mystery. Through believable and agile dialogues, children will use logical and deductive thinking to develop the hypotheses that will lead them to unveil each mystery.
Mystery in Patagonia: In the latest volume of the saga, Diego is invited by his grandfather to know each other at his home in the Chilean Patagonia. The grandfather’s wish is to recover the lost relationship with Diego, who will start to create an emotional bond with the lands where he comes from. After a robbery at the grandfather's house arises a mystery in the style of those Victorians in which nothing is what it seems. And although the immense and indomitable nature captivates the cousins, they will not rest until discovering the real culprit and motive.
Mystery at Los Piñones: Diego is invited by his cousin's family to spend the holidays in Los Piñones, a small village where they have a house for recreation and that only gets a little bit livelier with the arrival of summer. But all the calm of the place will be disturbed by the mysterious disappearance of the queen of the fair on the very day of her coronation.
Mystery in the Camp: The follow up of the adventures of Diego and his friends. This time the mystery moves to a camp located in the Andes mountains. There, the stories of suspense are intertwined and will keep the readers' interest.
Mystery at La Tirana: In this third delivery, Cósima the girl that Diego and Pablo met at the camp during last September's vacation, invites both of them to a spectacular trip to northern Chile to see the magical desert and the traditional festival of La Tirana. But that trip is overshadowed by the disappearance of important documents.
Until She Goes No More and Other Texts
Among the hills of the slopes of the Coast are my father’s lands. It’s amusing to me that they should be called that. I never saw the sea from there. My sister, Esther, is familiar with the ocean. She arrives with the news that even the earth smells differently and that from a distance one can feel the noise of the waves. To each one of us she gives a shell and teaches us to listen to the sound of the sea. It is a broken, remote sound, so distant that at times it disappears. I run my tongue over the shell. It is salty and smells somewhat disgusting. But I like it, and want to know the ocean.
Around here the landscape is immense. It is like an avalanche, the sky over the hills, waving in the wind with all the shades of gray. It envelops the curve of this land hardly touched by green and always covered with a blanket of dark, dry and dreary dust.
1997: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Award Finalist
A book that brings together four short novels. The outstanding Until She Goes No More takes place during the Unidad Popular, a political alliance period, under the democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende, and continues until the years following the military coup headed by Augusto Pinochet in 1973. It narrates the story of a provincial girl whose natural innocence makes her a victim of the deformations of an adult. This narrative situation allows the unfolding of a new vision of the rural world, whose beauty hides the merciless harassment of the landlords over the defenselessness of the servitude, through a language of surprising stylistic elegance and poetic evocative capacity.
Along with Tide, Japanese Garden and Material Fatigue, they form a literary body inhabited by female characters and worlds that make us travel through intimate and sinuous environments, childhood, desolation, abuse of power, concealment and denial, which reveal the rarefaction of sensuality, seduction and eroticism.
The Marías
A few minutes later a young man rushed in and sat down nearby. Estela felt her agitation and the altered rhythm of her breathing. On the screen, the vampire stalked the girl in a sensual and dramatic way, his shadow hovering over the woman’s white skin as she closed her eyes feeling the pleasure of blood, death, and possession. Estela knew that the man was touching himself, giving himself the pleasure that to her was forbidden and that was now just a few feet away. The tremor reached her gently and smoothly and altered the rhythm of her breathing as much as that of the stranger, who kept his eyes fixed on the actress’s neck, breaking backwards, moaning and falling languidly into the vampire’s arms.
This is the story of a family that emerges thanks to the early vision of the mother determined to ensure the economic future of her children. The narrator knows each detail and without euphemisms, with a stark realism, we confide the story of these characters: men and women apparently “very ordinary”, but at the time of the story they become unique and important.
"(...) Other men abound in these pages – uncles, suitors, sons-in-law to come – but the hard core of the story are the women, and the Chilean man becomes a large and hesitant child. Written with ease and intensity, Las Marías is another point of view on the evolution of Chilean society. Through a woman’s eye."
Artemio Echegoyen, literary critic.