lit a candle 5h ago94 years old. My uncle was the same age when we lost him this spring, different country, different life, but reading this this morning hit harder than I expected. Didn't know his poetry at all, just saw the headline and sat with it a minute.
Their story
Carlos Eduardo Jaramillo Castillo was an Ecuadorian poet and lawyer from Loja, and one of the leading voices of his country's Generation of the 1960s. In 2007 he received the Premio Nacional Eugenio Espejo, Ecuador's highest cultural honor, for his literary career. He died in Guayaquil on 13 October 2026…
Carlos Eduardo Jaramillo Castillo was an Ecuadorian poet and lawyer from Loja, and one of the leading voices of his country's Generation of the 1960s. In 2007 he received the Premio Nacional Eugenio Espejo, Ecuador's highest cultural honor, for his literary career. He died in Guayaquil on 13 October 2026 at the age of 94.
Jaramillo was born in Loja on 14 April 1932. He spent his childhood and youth there, finished secondary school, began studying law in Loja and completed his degree at the Universidad Central del Ecuador in Quito. Around the age of 28 or 29 he moved to Guayaquil, where he practiced law for decades, served as a judge of the Corte Superior de Justicia and taught at the Universidad de Guayaquil until he retired from teaching in 2000. Although the courtroom and the classroom took much of his working life, he kept writing poems throughout those years without pause.
His published work began with Escrito sobre la arena in 1955 and grew into more than a dozen collections. Among them are La noche y los vencidos, El hombre que quemó sus brújulas, Las desvelaciones de Jacob, Blues de la calle Loja and Blues del Puerto, a late autobiographical sequence about settling in the port city. Critics and cultural officials placed him with Jorge Enrique Adoum and Efraín Jara Idrovo as one of the three most important contemporary poetic voices in Ecuador. On 9 August 2007 President Rafael Correa awarded him the Premio Eugenio Espejo. In his nineties he continued to publish, including the large retrospective Fados del atardecer, which gathered hundreds of previously unpublished poems written over six decades of quiet, patient work.
El Universo and Expreso reported that he died on the morning of 13 October 2026 in Guayaquil. The cause of death was not made public. His wake was held at Camposanto Jardines de la Esperanza, with a religious service before burial. The Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana Núcleo de Loja paid tribute to his ties to the province and to national letters, remembering both the lawyer-judge and the poet who never stopped writing.
Biography adapted from El Universo, Expreso, Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0), Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana. Wikipedia ↗
Photos
1Carlos Eduardo Jaramillo with his book Blues del Puerto
by People Forever
Sorry for your loss. His work is worth looking into if you get the chance.