About 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. In 2011, an investigation was opened after Manuel Araya, Neruda's former personal assistant and driver, came forward with claims that Neruda had been murdered at the direction of Pinochet. According to Araya Neruda called him from the clinic hours before he died and said that a doctor had injected him in the stomach with an unknown substance. In 2013, Judge Mario Carroza ordered Neruda's remains exhumed for forensic testing. Initial results did not find any evidence to indicate Neruda had been poisoned. However, the Chilean government issued a statement in 2015 acknowledging that "it was clearly possible and highly likely" that Neruda was killed as a result of "the intervention of third parties". In 2017, it was reported that an international panel of 13 forensic experts had determined that there was no indication Neruda had died of cancer, and that they had identified evidence of a potentially "laboratory cultivated bacteria". In 2023, a toxicology report confirmed the presence of Clostridium botulinum in Neruda's teeth, indicating that he had in fact been poisoned. A court of appeals ruling reopened the official inquiry into his death in February 2024. Neruda is often considered the national poet of Chile, and his works have been popular and influential worldwide. The Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez once called him "the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language", and the critic Harold Bloom included Neruda as one of the writers central to the Western tradition in his book The Western Canon. Pablo Neruda ( nə-ROO-də; Spanish:; 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. On 18 July 1917, at the age of 13, he published his first work, an essay titled "Entusiasmo y perseverancia" ("Enthusiasm and Perseverance") in the local daily newspaper La Mañana, and signed it Neftalí Reyes. In the years since its publication, millions of copies have been sold, and it became Neruda's best-known work.
Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.