Poet, born in Mexico City, Mexico. He studied at the National University of Mexico, and fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. A career diplomat, he served as the Mexican ambassador to India (19628), and taught at Texas, Harvard, and Cambridge universities. He was a writer of great energy and versatility, with 30 volumes from 1933; his Collected Poems (195787), in Spanish and English, were published in 1988. He also wrote important prose works, notably Tiempo Nublado (1984, trans One Earth, Four or Five Worlds), and later works include The Double Flame: Essays on Love and Eroticism (1996). He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990.
Octavio Paz Lozano (March 31, 1914 – April 19, 1998) was a Mexican writer, poet, and diplomat, and the winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Early life and writings
Paz was born in Mexico City during tumultuous times, as his country was undergoing a revolution. His father, also named Octavio Paz, worked as a journalist and lawyer for Emiliano Zapata, and was involved in agrarian reform following the revolution, but these activities caused him to be largely absent from the home.
Paz was exposed to literature early in his life through the influence of his grandfather and library filled with classic works and modernist Mexican literature. Two years later, at the age of 19, Paz published Luna Silvestre ("Rustic Moon"), a collection of poems. By 1939, Paz considered himself first and foremost a poet.
In 1937, Paz ended his university studies, and left for Yucatán for work to find a school near Mérida. There, he began working on the poem Entre la piedra y la flor ("Between stone and flower") (1941, revised in 1976), which describes the situation and fate of the Mexican campesino (peasant) as a result of capitalist society.
In 1937, Paz visited Spain during that country's civil war, showing his solidarity with the Republicans. Upon returning to Mexico, Paz co-founded a literary journal, Taller ("Workshop") in 1938, and wrote for the magazine until 1941. In 1943 he received a Guggenheim fellowship and began studying at the University of California at Berkeley in the United States, and two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service, working in France until 1962. While there, in 1950, he wrote and published El laberinto de la soledad ("The Labyrinth of Solitude"), a groundbreaking study of Mexican identity and thought.
Later life
In 1962, Paz was appointed as Mexico's ambassador to India, and while there, he completed several works, including The Monkey Grammarian and East Slope. A collection of his poems (written between 1957 and 1987) was published in 1988.
Writings
A prolific author and poet, Paz published scores of works during his lifetime, many of which were translated into other languages. His poem, Piedra del sol ("Sunstone"), written in 1957, was praised as a "magnificent" example of surrealist poetry in the presentation speech of his Nobel Prize.
As an essayist Paz wrote on topics like Mexican politics and economics, Aztec art, anthropology, and sexuality. A key work in understanding Mexican culture, it greatly influenced other Mexican writers, such as Carlos Fuentes.
His works include the poetry collections La estación violenta, (1956), Piedra de sol (1957), Alternating Current (tr.
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