Alvaro Mutis (born august 25, 1923) is a Colombian poet, novelist, and essayist. Before returning to Colombia in his adolescence, he lived in Brussels, where his father held a post as a diplomat. He has lived in Mexico City since 1956.
Though critically acclaimed in the United States, his works are most widely read in Latin America and Europe, and have been translated into many languages. He is best known for his novellas featuring Maqroll el Gaviero (Maqroll the Lookout), a wandering sailor and adventurer. These have been gathered into a compendium, The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll (ISBN 0940322919, translated in English by Edith Grossman). One of his contemporaries wrote: Ruy Sanchez, Alberto. 'Alvaro Mutis y sus rituales goticos de Tierra Caliente' in Cuatro escritores rituales. Conaculta, 2000. ISBN 970-18-7269-X"An amazing adventure full of poetry, a narrative craft and a subtle philosophical content make of the Maqroll saga a major Work of the Literature written in Spanish"
His poetry was first published in 1948, his first short stories in 1978, but it was with his first novel featuring Maqroll, La nieve del Almirante (The Snow of the Admiral), published in 1986, for which he gained popular and critical acclaim. He has received many literary awards, including the Prix Medicis (France, 1989), Premio Principe de Asturias de las Letras and Reina Sofia (Spain, 1997), Premio Miguel de Cervantes (Spain, 2001), and the Neustadt Prize for Literature (United States, 2002).
Mutis combined his career as a writer of poetry and prose with a diverse set of non-literary occupations. Like his protagonist Maqroll, Mutis traveled widely in his professional roles including 5 years as Standard Oil's public relations director, and over 20 years as sales manager for Twentieth Century Fox and Columbia Pictures in their Latin American television divisions. Latin American television viewers would be familiar with his voice, as he did the narration for the Spanish-language television version of The Untouchables.
Mutis is a contemporary of other esteemed Latin American writers, notably Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the late Octavio Paz, who championed his early poetry. In the 1950s, Mutis spent 15 months in a Mexican prison due to his handling of money intended for charitable use by Standard Oil. His experience in prison had a lasting influence on his life and work, and is chronicled in the book Diario de Lecumberri.
References
External links
- Official Page
- BOMB Magazine: Alvaro Mutis Interview by Francisco Goldman
- [https://www.bu.edu/agni/poetry/print/2002/56-mutis.html English translation of the poem Tequila from AGNI]
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Other pages about Colombian-Mexicans
-Alvaro Mutis -Andres Chitiva -Miguel Calero
Other pages about Colombian novelists
-Alfredo Iriarte -Alvaro Mutis -Andres Caicedo -Enrique Santos Molano -Fernando Vallejo -Gabriel Garcia Marquez -Gustavo Bolivar -Henry H. Carter -James Canon -Jorge Isaacs -Jose Maria Vargas Vila -Josefa Acevedo de Gomez -Laura Restrepo -Max Vergara Poeti -Porfirio Barba-Jacob -Zacarias Reyan
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Alvaro_Mutis
