Miguel Ángel Asturias
Miguel Ángel Asturias Rosales (
October 19,
1899 –
June 9,
1974) was a
Guatemalan writer and diplomat. He was born in
Guatemala City, moved to at the age of five, and died in
Madrid,
Spain.
In 1904 his family moved from the capital to
Salamá,
Baja Verapaz, where they remained until 1908. In
1917, while studying law at the
Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala (after a brief one-year flirtation with medicine), Asturias participated in the
1920 uprising against dictator
Manuel Estrada Cabrera. He graduated in
1923 and went to
Paris,
France, to further his education at the
Sorbonne. While living in Paris, he was influenced by the gathering of writers and artists in
Montparnasse, and began writing poetry and fiction.
Asturias returned to Guatemala in
1933 where he worked as a journalist before serving in his country's diplomatic corps. When the government of
President Jacobo Arbenz fell in
1954, he was banned from the country by
Carlos Castillo Armas. While living in exile he became a well known author with the release of his novel,
Mulata. Eventually, in 1966, democratically elected President
Julio César Méndez Montenegro appointed him the ambassador to France, the same year he won the
Lenin Peace Prize.
He was awarded the
1967 Nobel Prize in literature "for his vivid literary achievement, deep-rooted in the national traits and traditions of Indian peoples of Latin America."
Asturias spent his final years in Madrid, where he died in 1974. He is buried in the
Cimetière du Père Lachaise in Paris.
During a
2005 meeting between a number of
Latin American Presidents in
Honduras, Mexican President
Vicente Fox was quoted as saying:
We have proposed to realize work together, according to our ancestors' visions...and we are the children of one seed, a generous land of men and women of the corn, as the great Guatemalan writer Miguel Ángel Asturias once said.
His son
Rodrigo Asturias, under the
nom de guerre Gaspar Ilom, was head of the
Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca, a unified rebel group during the
Civil War in the
1980s, and after the peace accords became the group's presidential candidate.
In 1991, the Guatemalan writer
Luis Cardoza y Aragón published
"Miguel Angel Asturias, Casi Novela" about their time together during the 1920s and 1930s in Paris.
*
Arquitectura de la vida nueva (1928)
*
Leyendas de Guatemala ("Legends of Guatemala") (1930)
*
Sonetos ("Sonnets") (1936)
*
El señor Presidente ("The President") (1946)
*
Hombres de maíz ("Men of Maize") (1949)
* "The Banana Trilogy"
**
Viento fuerte ("The Cyclone") (1950)
**
El papa verde ("The Green Pope") (1954)
**
Los ojos de los enterrados ("The Eyes of the Interred") (1960)
*
Carta Aérea a mis amigos de América (1952)
*
Week-end en Guatemala ("Weekend in Guatemala") (1956)
*
El alhajadito ("The Bejeweled Boy") (1961)
*
Mulata de tal (1963)
*
Rumania, su nueva imagen (1964)
*
Latinoamérica y otros ensayos (1968)
*
Malandrón (1969)
*
Viernes de Dolores (1972)
*
América, fábula de fábulas (1972)
*
Sociología guatemalteco (1977)
*
Tres de cuatro soles (1977)
*
Miguel Ángel Asturias on the Guatemalan Literature Webpage
*
Cardoza y Aragón "Miguel Angel Asturias, Casi Novela" (Miguel Angel Asturias, Almost a Novel). (1991) Ediciones Era.
Adapted from the article Miguel Asturias, from Wikinfo, licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
