Miguel Ángel Asturias

Miguel Ángel Asturias Rosales was a Guatemalan poet-diplomat, novelist, playwright and journalist. Winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1967, his work helped bring attention to the importance of indigenous cultures, especially those of his native Guatemala.

Asturias was born and raised in Guatemala though he lived a significant part of his adult life abroad. He first lived in Paris in the 1920s where he studied ethnology. Some scholars view him as the first Latin American novelist to show how the study of anthropology and linguistics could affect the writing of literature. While in Paris, Asturias also associated with the Surrealist movement, and he is credited with introducing many features of modernist style into Latin American letters. In this way, he is an important precursor of the Latin American Boom of the 1960s and 1970s.