(When Daniel Ortega, Nicaragua’s current dictator, revoked Ramírez’s citizenship, Boric offered him the Chilean nationality.In this edition of Author Talks, McKinsey Global Publishing’s Alexandra Mondalek chats with tech venture capitalists Freada Kapor Klein and Mitchell Kapor about their new book, Closing the Equity Gap: Creating Wealth and Fostering Justice in Startup Investing (HarperCollins Publishers, March 2023). Sergio Ramírez, an exceptional novelist, served as vice president of Nicaragua during the first Sandinista government.

Mario Vargas Llosa, whose works count as one of the high marks of Latin American contemporary fiction, was a candidate for the presidency of Peru. Only after Venezuelan Rómulo Gallegos had written several major novels was he elected president of his country. José Martí, who died on the battlefield fighting for Cuban independence in 1895, produced an astonishing range of poems and essays that inspired both that struggle and Fidel Castro’s revolution decades later. Argentina’s Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, while exiled in Santiago, wrote “Facundo,” a hybrid of essay and fiction considered an essential masterpiece of the 19th century, and went on to capably govern his country.

In an alternative universe, it is conceivable that someone with Boric’s voracious reading habits and cultural aspirations would have created a mature oeuvre of literary work before entering the political arena, an example set by some of Latin America’s most accomplished authors. Many decades later, Boric made the same pilgrimage. Literature’s call to a young Boric would have been further amplified by the fact that a number of Chile’s foremost poets (and Boric’s favorites) were born in far-flung provinces: Pablo Neruda in Temuco, Gabriela Mistral in the Valle del Elqui, Nicanor Parra in Chillán, Pablo de Rokha in Licantén and Gonzalo Rojas in Concepción, to name just a few who journeyed to Santiago to pursue their literary ambitions. As a child, little Gabriel would recite extensive stanzas his grandfather had read to him and, by adolescence, had joined a literary workshop, writing incandescent poems and editing a literary magazine. But Boric’s fascination with poetry and literature is not incidental or ancillary it’s uniquely embedded in the his marrow. Seamus Heaney’s words about the rare moments when “hope and history rhyme,” from “The Cure at Troy,” have been repeated often by Bill Clinton and, over and over, by Joe Biden. Poetry, of course, is something politicians resort to from time to time.

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