Pablo Neruda

Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto, who took the pen name Pablo Neruda in homage to the Czech writer Jan Neruda, was born on 12 July 1904 in Parral in central Chile. His mother died of tuberculosis a month after his birth, and his railway-worker father moved the family south to the rainy frontier town of Temuco, where the young Neftalí published his first poems at thirteen in the local newspaper La Mañana.

At nineteen, while studying French at the Instituto Pedagógico in Santiago, he published Crepusculario (1923), and a year later Veinte Poemas de Amor y una Canción Desesperada (1924), the love sequence that has sold more than two million copies in Spanish. Appointed Chilean honorary consul to Rangoon in 1927, he served in Colombo, Batavia, Buenos Aires, Madrid and Mexico City, and during the Spanish Civil War organised the rescue of more than 2,000 Republican refugees aboard the Winnipeg, which sailed for Valparaíso in September 1939.

Elected Communist senator for the northern nitrate provinces in 1945, he was forced underground in 1948 after denouncing President González Videla and crossed the Andes on horseback into Argentine exile, where he completed Canto General (1950), the continental epic of Latin America. His Odas Elementales (1954–1957) celebrated tomatoes, wine and salt in plain free verse.

Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature on 21 October 1971, he served Salvador Allende as ambassador to France until ill health forced his return. He died in Santiago on 23 September 1973, twelve days after the Pinochet coup.

The masculine given name Pablo is the Spanish form of Paul, from the Latin Paulus meaning small. He shaped it into one of the largest poetic voices of twentieth-century Latin America.