Octavio Paz

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City in 1914, the grandson of a liberal writer and politician whose library he explored as a child, and the son of a lawyer who supported Emiliano Zapata during the Revolution. He published his first book of poems while still a student, and in 1937 travelled to Spain for an international congress of anti-fascist writers held in the middle of the Civil War, an experience that marked his politics and his poetry. That same year he married the writer Elena Garro.

Paz entered the Mexican diplomatic service in the 1940s and was posted to Paris, where he came into contact with the surrealists, and later to Japan and India. The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950), an essay on Mexican identity, history and masks, became one of the defining books of twentieth-century Mexican thought. Sun Stone (1957), a long circular poem modelled on the Aztec calendar, fuses personal love, myth and the violence of history. As ambassador to India from 1962 he absorbed Indian thought and art, which entered Eastern Slope and the prose poem The Monkey Grammarian. In 1968 he resigned his post in protest at the massacre of students in Tlatelolco.

Back in Mexico he founded the reviews Plural and later Vuelta, from which he argued for liberal democracy and against authoritarianism of both left and right. His study of the seventeenth-century nun-poet Sor Juana (1982) is a landmark of literary biography. He received the Cervantes Prize in 1981 and the Nobel Prize in 1990, the first Mexican writer so honoured, and died in Mexico City in 1998.