David Gallagher

David Gallagher was Chilean Ambassador to the UK between 2018 and 2022.

He was educated at the Grange in Santiago and then at Downside in Somerset. He took a First in Modern Languages (Russian main) at Oxford in 1965.

From 1968 to 1974, he was Oxford University Lecturer in Latin American Literature, Fellow of St Antony´s College and member of its Latin American Centre. From 1974, he pursued a career as an investment banker, first with Morgan Grenfell in London, where he became Director Morgan Grenfell International, and then, from 1982, in Chile, where he founded investment banking boutique ASSET-Chile S.A. He was Chairman of ASSET-Chile until selling his stake to his partners at the end of 2017. He was also on the Board of Latin American retailer Cencosud until 2018.

David is a frequent contributor to the TLS, the New York Review of Books, and various Chilean publications. He is the author of ‘Modern Latin American Literature’ (Oxford, 1973), ‘Improvisaciones’ and ‘Otras Improvisaciones’ (Santiago, 1992 and 2004).

He is on various Boards of non-profit foundations including Teatro del Lago, Fundación Conectado Aprendo, AthenaLab (Advisory Board) and Centro de Estudios Publicos (CEP), one of Latin America’s leading think tanks, where he is an honorary director and one of its original founders in the 1980s.

Until 2019, he was on the Advisory Board of the Peggy Guggenheim Foundation in Venice and in two 3-year stints, Chairman of its Executive Committee, and its representative on the Board of the Solomon Guggenheim Foundation in New York. He is a former director (2000-2018) and current member of the Chilean Council for International Relations. He is a frequent speaker on international affairs, politics, economics, and literature.