Octavio Paz

Octavio Paz Lozano was born in March 31, 1914 – April 19, 1998) was a Mexican poet-diplomat and writer.

For his body of work, he was awarded the 1981 Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the 1982 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and the 1990 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Octavio Paz was introduced to literature early in his life through the influence of his grandfather's library, filled with classic Mexican and European literature.

As a teenager in 1931, Paz published his first poems, including "Cabellera". Two years later, at the age of 19, he published  "Wild Moon", a collection of poems. In 1932, with some friends, he founded his first literary review, Barandal. In 1937 at the age of 23, Paz abandoned his law studies and left Mexico City for Yucatán to work at a school in Mérida, set up for the sons of peasants and workers.There, he began working on the first of his long, ambitious poems,"Between the Stone and the Flower" (1941, revised in 1976). Influenced by the work of T. S. Eliot, it explores the situation of the Mexican peasant under the domineering landlords of the day.

In India, Paz completed several works, including The Monkey Grammarian and Eastern Slope. While in India, he met numerous writers of a group known as the Hungry Generation and had a profound influence on them. He met his first wife Elena Garro a writer in Mexico City and was married to her in 1937, they were together until 1959. They had a daughter Helena Laura Paz Garro. In 1965, he married Marie-José Tramini, a French woman who would be his wife for the rest of his life. In October 1968, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest of the Mexican government's massacre of student demonstrators in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Tlatelolco.

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