LITERARY PAGE: ALVARO MUTIS

Publicado en Capital Letter No. 1
Junio de 2002


Colombian poet and narrator. He was born in Bogota, but he lived most of his childhood in Belgium. He has been living in Mexico since the 1960's. He was recently awarded the 2002 Cervantes Prize for his contributions to Spanish Literarure. He, still young, begins collaborating in literary magazines.


   His first publication of poetry was La Balanza, in 1947, with Carlos Patino's collaboration. Los elementos del desastre (1953) is a book in which his famous character "Maqroll, el gaviero" appears as one of the biggest landmarks in the Spanish lit¬erature of this century. In 1960, he starts a voyage through prose with the text Diario de Lecumberri which was set in a Mexican prison under this name. In 1973, he publishes a novel called "La Mansion de Araucaima", and gathers all his poems from 1948 to 1970 in the book "Suma de Maqroll el gaviero".


   In 1983, he receives the Colombian National Literature Award. Many of his most important works are: La Nieve del Almirante (1986), which won the prize for Best Foreign Novel in France; llona llega con la lluvia (1988), Un bel morir (1989), La ultima escala del Trump Steamer (1990), Amircar (1990), and Abdul Bashur, sohador de navio (1991).


   Mutis writes in a discursive language in poetry as in narrative; full of images and suggestions of the afterlife, he introduces Maqroll as a witness of death tragedies and degeneration.