Álvaro Mutis

Colombian · 1923 to 2013

Born Álvaro Mutis Jaramillo on August 25, 1923, in Bogotá, Colombia, he was two years old when his father, a lawyer newly entered into the diplomatic service, moved the family to Brussels; his father died suddenly there in 1931, and his mother brought him back to Colombia, to her family's coffee hacienda at Coello in Tolima, where he spent much of his boyhood. He left school in Bogotá without finishing it, drifted into radio and public relations work, and in 1948 published his first book of poems, La balanza, written with Carlos Patiño. Two years later he met a young journalist named Gabriel García Márquez, beginning a friendship that lasted the rest of both their lives. In the mid-1950s, working as publicity manager for the Colombian subsidiary of Standard Oil, Mutis was accused of misusing company charity funds, in part to help friends targeted by the Rojas Pinilla dictatorship; he fled to Mexico City in 1956, was arrested there two years later, and spent fifteen months in the Lecumberri prison, an ordeal he set down in Diario de Lecumberri (1960). Cleared once the dictatorship fell, he made Mexico his permanent home, supporting his writing for decades as a sales executive for 20th Century Fox and Columbia Pictures. Between 1986 and 1993 he published the seven short novels that make up Empresas y tribulaciones de Maqroll el Gaviero, following a stateless, aging sailor across the ports and rivers of an imagined world; the cycle, gathered in English as The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll, won him the Miguel de Cervantes Prize in 2001 and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2002. He died of a cardiorespiratory ailment in Mexico City on September 22, 2013, at the age of ninety, having lived there for more than half a century.