Álvaro Mutis

Mutis spent part of his childhood in Brussels, where his father served as a diplomat, before the family returned to Colombia; he never attended university, working instead for decades in public relations for the oil and film industries in both Colombia and Mexico.

In Mexico in 1959 he was briefly imprisoned on embezzlement charges tied to funds he had handled for an employer, an ordeal, resolved without conviction, that darkened the fatalism running through his work. He had already been writing poems about a doomed, itinerant sailor named Maqroll for years before finally recasting the cycle as the linked novellas of his sixties.

He received both the Cervantes Prize and the Prince of Asturias Award, and died in Mexico City in 2013.