#Maya and miguel free#

In 1920, Asturias participated in the uprising against the dictator Manuel Estrada Cabrera. Asturias began writing as a student and wrote the first draft of a story that would later become his novel El Señor Presidente. Asturias first attended Colegio del Padre Pedro and then, Colegio del Padre Solís. Here they established a supply store where Asturias spent his adolescence. In 1908, when Asturias was nine, his family returned to the suburbs of Guatemala City. It was here that Asturias first came into contact with Guatemala's indigenous people his nanny, Lola Reyes, was a young indigenous woman who told him stories of their myths and legends that would later have a great influence on his work.

#Maya and miguel free#

set free some students arrested for causing a disturbance, he clashed directly with the dictator, lost his job, and he and his family were forced to move in 1905 to the town of Salamá, the departmental capital of Baja Verapaz, where Miguel Ángel Asturias lived on his grandparents' farm. Following an incident in 1904 which, in his capacity as judge, Asturias Sr. As Asturias later recalled, 'My parents were quite persecuted, though they were not imprisoned or anything of the sort'. ĭespite his relative privilege, Asturias's father opposed the dictatorship of Manuel Estrada Cabrera, who had come to power in February 1898. In 1905, when the writer was six years old, the Asturias family moved to the house of Asturias' grandparents, where they lived a more comfortable lifestyle. Asturias's parents were of Spanish descent, and reasonably distinguished: his father could trace his family line back to colonists who had arrived in Guatemala in the 1660s his mother, whose ancestry was more mixed, was the daughter of a colonel. Two years later, his brother, Marco Antonio, was born. Miguel Ángel Asturias was born in Guatemala City on October 19, 1899, the first child of Ernesto Asturias Girón, a lawyer and judge, and María Rosales de Asturias, a schoolteacher. He is buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. Asturias spent his final years in Madrid, where he died at the age of 74. The following year he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, becoming the second Latin American author to receive this honor ( Gabriela Mistral had won it in 1945). In 1966, he won the Soviet Union's Lenin Peace Prize. His work is often identified with the social and moral aspirations of the Guatemalan people.Īfter decades of exile and marginalization, Asturias finally received broad recognition in the 1960s. Asturias combined his extensive knowledge of Mayan beliefs with his political convictions, channeling them into a life of commitment and solidarity.

The book that is sometimes described as his masterpiece, Hombres de maíz ( Men of Maize), is a defense of Mayan culture and customs. Asturias' very public opposition to dictatorial rule led to him spending much of his later life in exile, both in South America and in Europe. The novel influenced later Latin American novelists in its mixture of realism and fantasy. One of Asturias' most famous novels, El Señor Presidente, describes life under a ruthless dictator.

In this way, he is an important precursor of the Latin American Boom of the 1960s and 1970s. 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. 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. He first lived in Paris in the 1920s where he studied ethnology. Asturias helped establish Latin American literature's contribution to mainstream Western culture, and at the same time drew attention to the importance of indigenous cultures, especially those of his native Guatemala.Īsturias was born and raised in Guatemala though he lived a significant part of his adult life abroad. Miguel Ángel Asturias Rosales ( Spanish pronunciation: October 19, 1899 – June 9, 1974) was a Nobel Prize-winning Guatemalan poet-diplomat, novelist, playwright and journalist.