This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.

MADRID — Luis Sepúlveda, a Chilean writer whose stay among Indigenous people in the Amazon led to his most celebrated novel and who was jailed during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, died April 16 in Oviedo, Spain. He was 70.

The cause was the novel coronavirus, according to Tusquets, his publishing house in Barcelona. Mr. Sepúlveda, who was hospitalized in February, was among the first wave of people in Spain to be diagnosed with the coronavirus.

Mr. Sepúlveda published several novels, children’s stories and travel books, and he also wrote and directed films. He acquired fame with his novel “The Old Man Who Read Love Stories” (1988), which tells the story of a man who, together with his wife, leaves his mountain village to take part in the colonization of the Amazon.