Miguel Ángel Asturias

Asturias studied in Paris in the 1920s under the anthropologist Georges Raynaud, translating the Popol Vuh, the Maya creation epic, into Spanish while absorbing Surrealism from the same cafés that produced Breton's circle. He returned to Guatemala convinced that its Indigenous myth and its brutal political present were the same material.

El Señor Presidente, drafted across those Paris years and finished after his return home, was too dangerous to publish in Guatemala under the dictatorship it caricatured and appeared first in Mexico in 1946. He later served as a diplomat and wrote a 'Banana Trilogy' attacking United Fruit Company's grip on Central America.

He won the Nobel Prize in 1967 and died in Madrid in 1974.