Miguel Ángel Asturias

Miguel Ángel Asturias (1899-1974), Guatemalan writer, diplomat, and winner of the 1967 Nobel Prize in literature. He was one of Latin America’s leading literary figures of the 1960s. Born in Guatemala City, Asturias received his law degree from the University of San Carlos of Guatemala. In 1924 he left Guatemala to study at the Sorbonne in Paris, France, where he became interested in Maya history and culture. In France Asturias was influenced by the French writer André Breton, a leader of the literary movement toward surrealism. Having returned to Guatemala in the early 1930s, in 1942 Asturias was elected to the Guatemalan congress. In 1946 he was named Guatemala’s cultural attaché to Mexico, after which he served successively as Guatemala’s ambassador to Argentina and then El Salvador. In 1954 anti-Communist forces overthrew Guatemala’s government and Asturias went into exile in Argentina and then Italy. When Julio Cesar Méndez Montenegro was elected president of Guatemala in 1966 he appointed Asturias as Guatemala’s ambassador to France, a position he held from 1966 to 1970.

For his novels and poetry, most of which was strongly anti-imperialist, Asturias earned the Lenin Peace Prize in 1966 as well as the Nobel Prize a year later. Among his best-known novels are El señor presidente (1946; The President, 1964), Mulatade tal (1963; translated 1967), Hombres de maiz (1949; Men of Maize, 1975), and Viento fuerte (1950; The Strong Wind, 1968). Viento fuerte was mentioned in Asturias’s Nobel citation, in which he was commended for “his highly colored writings rooted in a national individuality and Native American traditions.”