Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda was the pen name, later his legal name, of Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto, born in 1904 in Parral, Chile. His mother died soon after his birth, and he grew up in Temuco, in southern Chile, where his father was a railway worker. He began writing poems as a boy. While studying in Santiago he published Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924), which became one of the best-selling books of poetry in Spanish. He then served as a Chilean consul in Burma and other countries, and in Spain, where he witnessed the Spanish Civil War, which led him to communism and to political poetry. Back in Chile he was elected a senator, but in 1948, after criticizing the government, he went into hiding and then exile. His Canto General (1950) is a vast poem about the history and nature of Latin America. He returned to Chile in 1952. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971. He died in Santiago in 1973, days after a military coup.

Pablo Neruda is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: Baptized as a child; he was an atheist. Source: Wikipedia