Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda ( nə-ROO-də; Spanish: [ˈpaβlo neˈɾuða] ; born Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto; 12 July 1904 – 23 September 1973) was a Chilean poet-diplomat and politician who won the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature. Neruda became known as a poet when he was 13 years old and wrote in a variety of styles, including surrealist poems, historical epics, political manifestos, a prose autobiography, and passionate love poems such as the ones in his collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924).

Neruda occupied many diplomatic positions in various countries during his lifetime and served a term as a senator for the Chilean Communist Party. When President Gabriel González Videla outlawed communism in Chile in 1948, a warrant was issued for Neruda's arrest. Friends hid him for months, and in 1949 he escaped through a mountain pass near Maihue Lake into Argentina; he would not return to Chile for more than three years. He was a close advisor to Chile's socialist president Salvador Allende; Neruda served as Chile's ambassador to France under his presidency. When he went back to Chile after accepting his Nobel Prize in Stockholm, Allende invited him to read at the Estadio Nacional before 70,000 people.

In September 1973, Neruda was diagnosed with prostate cancer. The same month, after the coup d'état led by Augusto Pinochet overthrew Allende's government and resulted in Allende's suicide, Neruda made plans to flee to Mexico in exile. On 23 September, the day before he was to leave the country, Neruda died at the Santa María medical clinic in Santiago, where he had been receiving cancer treatment. While the official cause of death was listed as complications from prostate cancer, the cause and circumstances of his death have been a subject of intense debate, controversy, and investigation ever since.