Octavio Paz Biography

Octavio Paz was a Mexican writer and diplomat who was best known for his poetry, including the 10-volume collection Piedra de sol (1957, English translation Sun Stone, 1963). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1990.

He published his first collection of poems, Luna Sylvester (Wild Moon) when he was only 19 years old, and founded the first of many literary journals shortly after that. During the 1940s, Paz studied in California and worked in the Mexican diplomatic service in New York and Paris. Between 1962 and 1968, he was Mexico’s ambassador to India.

His early poems were informed by Marxism and surrealism, but by the end of his career he was known for ambitious lyrical poems that explored history, politics and culture. Paz’s influential prose works included  1950’s El laberinto de la soledad (The Labryinth of Solitude, 1962) and 1970’s Postdata (The Other Mexico: Critique of the Pyramid, 1972).