Pablo Neruda.

Born Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto in Parral, Chile on July 12, 1904, Neruda’s family moved to Temuco when he was a few months old. There he developed an early passion for poetry, writing his first works and adopting the pseudonym Pablo Neruda to hide his writing from his disapproving father, José del Carmen Reyes Morales. His mother, Rosa Neftalí Basoalto Opazo, died when he was young, and he was raised by his father and stepmother.

Neruda published his first book of poems at age 19 and soon gained recognition. He served as honorary Chilean consul in Burma, Ceylon, Java, Singapore, Buenos Aires, Barcelona, and Madrid in the 1930s and 1940s. His friendship with Federico García Lorca deeply influenced his style. In 1943, he returned to Chile but fled into exile in 1949 after President Gabriel González Videla targeted him for his communist views. He lived in Europe until 1952. His most famous work, 100 Love Sonnets Cien sonetos de amor, was published in 1959. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971.

Neruda married María Antonieta Hagenaar in 1930; they had a daughter, Malva Marina, born in 1934 and who died in 1942. He divorced Hagenaar and married Delia de Carril in 1942, separating in 1955. In 1966, he married Matilde Urrutia, who remained with him until his death. He was a close friend of Salvador Allende, the democratically elected socialist president of Chile who was overthrown and killed in the 1973 coup.

Neruda’s love poetry, particularly 100 Love Sonnets, remains widely read. Suspicions that he was murdered by injection shortly after the 1973 coup led to an exhumation of his remains in 2013; international scientists rejected the official cause of death, cancer cachexia, and found no evidence of cachexia. Gabriel García Márquez called him the greatest poet of his era. The case remains open.