Gustavo Gutiérrez Merino was born in Lima, Peru, in 1928. Founder and director of the Bartolomé de las Casas Institute, in Lima, he was the first person to synthesize and draw together the ideas of the Theology of Liberation, coining and defining the term in a conference given in 1969 and in a book published two years later. He is a man with a solid humanistic, theological and pastoral training (he has studied Medicine, Arts, Philosophy, Psychology and Theology) and is at present parish priest in Lima's slum quarter of Rimac, having studied in Lyon, Louvain, Rome and Paris, and lectured in Theology at the Universidad Católica de Lima.

He is considered one of the most spiritual of the writers on the Theology of Liberation, managing to steer clear of the radicalism that other theologians have become embroiled in. He bases his ideas on solid Biblical foundations, and proposes that the liberation preached by Christ, rather than being purely spiritual, also involves liberation from earthly injustice, leading on to a belief that such liberation requires profound reform of the present-day political structures of Latin America, the continent at the hub of the Theology of Liberation.

Doctor honoris causa at several universities (including the University of Nimega in Belgium, King's College and Haverford College in the U.S.A., Switzerland's Fribourg, Germany's Tubingen Universities, and Quebec University in Canada, amongst others), he is the author of more than ten books, including, to name just some, A Theology of Liberation, The Truth Shall Make You Free, and In Search of the Poor of Jesus Christ. He has been awarded such distinctions as the Juan Mejía Beca Prize (Peru, 1993) and the Order of the Knight of the Legion of Honour (France). He has been a member of the Peruvian Academy of Language since 1995.