leith passmore

I am an Australian writer based in Santiago, Chile.

My history of the memory of compulsory military service during the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile – The Wars inside Chile’s Barracks (2017) – won the 2018 Best Book Award (Social Sciences) of the Southern Cone Studies section of the Latin American Studies Association.

The Spanish-language version of The Wars inside Chile’s Barracks was published in 2023 as Las guerras dentro de los cuarteles.

My previous book – Ulrike Meinhof and the Red Army Faction (2011) – is a history of West Germany’s most infamous terrorist group and one of its founding members, journalist-turned-terrorist Ulrike Meinhof.

I have published articles and book chapters on the history of terrorism, political violence, the body, hunger, memory, and gender in the contexts of Cold-War West Germany and the Chilean civic-military dictatorship.

I am currently developing a feature-length screenplay. El escultor is a drama set in the boxing scene and silent film industry of 1920s Chile.

I am also working on a history of the Women’s Prison in Santiago between 1962 and 1998 and a history of the policing of sex and gender in Pinochet’s Santiago.