Biography
Miguel Ángel Asturias (1899 - 1974) was a famous writer and poet, as well as a diplomat from Guatemala. He was born in Guatemala City on October 19, 1899, and in 1917 began studying law at the University of Guatemala. In 1920 he took part in the revolution against the dictator Canberra, while in 1923, he published his doctoral dissertation on "The social problem of the Indian".After graduation he went to Paris where he continued his education at the Sorbonne. While living in Paris, he was influenced by the intellectual movement of the city and began writing poetry and novels. In Paris he will write his first work, "Legends of Guatemala" in which he refers to his country before the Spanish conquest.
He returned to Guatemala in 1933 with the manuscript of his novel "The President", which will be published in 1946 with great success. In the same year he was appointed diplomatic attaché in Mexico and later in Argentina. In 1953, he was appointed ambassador to El Salvador. After the fall of the Arbenz government in 1954, he was exiled to Argentina, but later lived in France and Italy, and in 1966 was appointed ambassador of Guatemala to Paris. All these years he did not stop writing novels and poetry. In 1966 he was awarded the Lenin Prize for Peace and in 1967 the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Asturias resigned from the diplomatic corps in 1970 and spent the last years of his life in Madrid, where he died in 1974.