Octavio Irineo Paz Lozano was his full name. He was born in Mexico DF on March 31, 1914 during the Mexican Revolution.
He was raised in Mixcoac by Josefina Lozano, Amalia Paz and Ireneo Paz, mother, aunt and grandfather respectively. His grandfather was a retired soldier, liberal intellectual, and novelist.
His father, Octavio Paz Solórzano, worked as a lawyer for Emiliano Zapata; becoming involved in the agrarian reform that followed the Revolution and was also a deputy.
Due to his busy schedule, his father was absent from home most of the time. These influences made Octavio Paz turn to politics as well as writing.
He was a Mexican poet and essayist, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. He is considered one of the most influential authors of the 20th century and one of the great poets of all time.
At the age of seventeen, he published his first poems in the Barandal magazine. Later he directed the magazines Taller and Son prodigal.
After completing his university studies in Law at UNAM in 1937, he traveled to Yucatán as a member of educational missions. That same year he married Elena Garro, also a highly reputable Mexican writer. They had a daughter, Helena Laura Paz Garro, and their marriage broke up in 1959.
In 1965 he married the French Marie-José Tramini, with whom he lived until his death. On a trip to Spain, he came into contact with intellectuals from the Spanish Republic and Pablo Neruda, who strongly influenced him in his poetics.
His work encompassed various genres, highlighting his poetic texts, essays and translations. Through the surrealist poet Benjamín Péret he met André Breton, in addition he was related to Albert Camus and other European and Spanish-American intellectuals of postwar Paris.
This instance will define with precision its cultural and political positions; he moved away from Marxism and approached surrealism, beginning to be interested in the most diverse subjects.
During the 1950s Octavio Paz published four fundamental books: El laberinto de la soledad, personal portrait in the mirror of Mexican society;
The bow and the lyre, his most rigorous effort to elaborate a poetic; ¿Águila o sol ?, a prose book with a surrealist influence; and Parole.
In 1962 he was an official of the Mexican embassy in India, where he published the books of poems Salamandra, prior to his trip to India, and Ladera este, which includes his production in that country, and which includes his second long poem, Blanco .
6 years later he resigned from his post as ambassador to India due to the murders committed by the Government of Mexico, on October 2 of that year, when the Army charged against university demonstrators, and in 1971 he founded the magazine Plural, in his country, in which some of the most important writers of the later generation collaborated.
In 1990 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Octavio Paz died on April 19, 1998, victim of cancer, in the same city where he was born.
The story is also news on Radio Perfil. Voiceover by Pita Fortín, script by Cecilia Claps and editing by Antonio Esmoris.
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On November 23, 1981, the Mexican writer Octavio Paz won the Cervantes Prize for Literature