Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda was a Chilean poet and politician, born on 12 July 1904 in Parral, in the south of Chile. He took his pen name while still young and became one of the most widely read poets in the Spanish language. His early love poems made him famous as a very young man, and he went on to write in many styles, from intimate lyric verse to political and historical poetry about the Americas and its people.

Neruda also worked as a diplomat, serving Chile in several countries, and he was active in politics, which brought him both honour and exile. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971. He died on 23 September 1973 in Chile. Readers still return to him for his sensuous images of love, nature and the everyday world, and for his belief that poetry belongs to ordinary people.