Miguel Ángel Asturias

Asturias was born in Guatemala on 19 October 1899, but his formation happened in Paris during the 1920s, where he studied ethnology and fell in with the Surrealists. Scholars credit him as the first Latin American novelist to channel anthropology and linguistics directly into fiction, and he introduced magical realism into the continent's letters - a decade or two before the Boom. His novel *El Señor Presidente* mixed realism and fantasy to sketch life under a ruthless dictator; *Hombres de maíz*, sometimes called his masterpiece, defended Mayan culture with a weave of myth and politics. That opposition to dictatorship cost him: he spent much of his later life in exile, South America and Europe both. Recognition arrived late - the Lenin Peace Prize in 1966, the Nobel in 1967, making him the second Latin American laureate after Gabriela Mistral. He died in Madrid on 9 June 1974 at seventy-four and was buried in Père Lachaise.