Elena Castedo


Elena Castedo is a Spanish-born American author and educator who writes in both Spanish and English.
The daughter of Leopold Castedo, an art historian, and Elvira Magana, a linguist, she was born in Barcelona. Her family fled to Chile during the Spanish Civil War. Castedo married Dalton Wooding in 1958. He died in 1965 and, in 1973, she married A. Denny Ellerman. In 1966, she received a teaching degree from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, followed by an MA in Spanish from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1968 and a PhD from Harvard University in 1976.
Her 1986 short story "Troopers" received a Phoebe Award. In 1991, she published her first novel Paradise; it was nominated for a National Book Award for Fiction; the Spanish version El Paradiso was a number one best-seller for five months and was named Book of the Year by the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio. A 1991 short story "The White Bedspread" won the PEN/Syndicated fiction contest and received another Phoebe Award. Her articles, poems and short stories have appeared in various publications, including African American Review, Americas, Amthropo's, Hispamerica and Phoebe.
Castedo taught in Santiago from 1966 to 1967. She has been a teaching fellow at Harvard and has lectured at the American University. She has also been an editor for the Inter-American review of bibliography.