Miguel Ángel Asturias

Miguel Ángel Asturias was born in Guatemala City in 1899, during the dictatorship of Manuel Estrada Cabrera. When his father, a judge, fell foul of the regime, the family moved to Salamá in the countryside, where the boy first encountered the Indigenous Maya culture that would become central to his work. He studied law at the University of San Carlos, graduating in 1923 with a thesis on the social problem of the Indian, and then left for Europe.

In Paris he studied the religions of the Maya at the Sorbonne, worked on a Spanish translation of the Popol Vuh, and absorbed the experiments of the Surrealists. Legends of Guatemala, praised by Paul Valéry, reimagined Mayan myth in rich, incantatory prose. The President, finished in 1933 but not published until 1946, portrayed a nightmarish dictatorship through a language of dream, distortion and pun, and became a model for the Latin American ‘dictator novel’. Men of Maize, often called his masterpiece, set the Maya view of maize as sacred substance against its exploitation as a commodity. The ‘banana trilogy’, beginning with Strong Wind, attacked the power of the United Fruit Company. His fusion of myth and reality anticipated what would later be called magical realism.

Asturias served the reforming governments of Juan José Arévalo and Jacobo Árbenz as a diplomat; after the 1954 coup he was stripped of his citizenship and lived in exile, chiefly in Argentina and later Europe. In 1966 he received the Lenin Peace Prize and was appointed ambassador to France; the Nobel Prize followed in 1967. He died in Madrid in 1974 and is buried in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris.