Miguel Ángel Asturias

Have you ever heard a story that has stayed with you ever since? For Miguel Ángel Asturias, the stories that he heard as a child became the heart of his work. They took him from Guatemala all the way to the Nobel Prize.

Asturias was born in Guatemala City in 1899. When he was a small boy, his father, a judge, had problems with the dictator Manuel Estrada Cabrera. In 1905, the family moved to Salamá, a town in Baja Verapaz. There, his nanny, a young indigenous woman named Lola Reyes, told him the old legends of her people. The family returned to the city in 1908, but the stories never left him.

He studied law at the University of San Carlos and finished his degree in 1923. Soon after, he moved to Paris, where he studied the religions of the ancient Maya at the Sorbonne with Professor Georges Raynaud. Raynaud had translated the Popol Vuh, the sacred book of the K'iche' people, into French. Together with a Mexican friend, Asturias translated Raynaud's French version into Spanish.

In Paris, he also wrote his own versions of the legends that he had heard in Salamá. Legends of Guatemala came out in 1930, and the French poet Paul Valéry praised it. Asturias also finished a novel about a cruel dictator, The President, in 1933, but it wasn't published until 1946. Then came Men of Maize in 1949. Its title comes from the Popol Vuh, where the gods make the first people out of corn.

In 1966, he became Guatemala's ambassador to France. The next year, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature for writing that is deeply rooted in the traditions of the indigenous peoples of Latin America. He died in Madrid in 1974 and was buried in Paris.

Since then, his books have been translated into many languages. Readers who have never visited Guatemala have met its gods, heroes and ghosts through his pages. In Guatemala City, the national cultural center, home of the National Theater, is named after him.

Asturias showed the world that the stories people tell at home can be great literature. In Guatemala, grandparents still tell children about the Sombrerón and the Cadejo. Every country has legends like these. If you could tell the world one legend from your country, which one would you choose?