Profile
Pablo Neruda: The People's Poet of Chile
Nobel Prize-winning Chilean poet and diplomat, born on 12 July 1904
Pablo Neruda was born Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto on 12 July 1904 in Parral, Chile. He adopted his pen name as a teenager, partly to hide his poetry from his disapproving father.
At 19 he published Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, which made him famous. As a diplomat he served in Asia, Spain and Mexico, and the Spanish Civil War turned him towards political poetry.
Forced into hiding and exile in the late 1940s, he completed his epic Canto General. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971 and died in 1973, just days after the military coup in Chile.
Career highlights
- 1904Born in Parral, Chile
- 1924Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair: his breakthrough
- 1927Diplomatic posts in Asia: begin a long consular career
- 1936Spanish Civil War: deeply shapes his politics
- 1945Elected senator: for the Chilean Communist Party
- 1950Canto General: his epic of Latin America
- 1971Nobel Prize in Literature
- 1973Dies in Santiago: days after the military coup
Did you know?His homes in Santiago, Valparaíso and Isla Negra, filled with his collections of shells, bottles and ship figureheads, are now museums.
