He returned to his home country in 1989 and was appointed Chilean ambassador in Berlin in 2000. Skármeta received several international prizes for his novels, narrations, audio dramas and scripts. One of his biggest successes, the novel Ardiente paciencia, was made into a film several times, the latest under the title Il postino. In 2014 Skármeta was awarded the Premio Nacional de Literatura de Chile - the prize had already in 1945 been awarded to his friend and Nobel Prize Laureate Pablo Neruda who inspired his writings.