Carlos Fuentes

For 50 years, Carlos Fuentes (1928-2012) was one of the leading literary and political figures of the Spanish-speaking world. A giant of Latin America's literary boom of the 1960s and '70s, his novels, including the classics Terra Nostra, The Death of Artemio Cruz and The Old Gringo, are passionate explorations of the history and identity of the Latin American nations, and of their contentious relationship with the superpower to the north. The son of a Mexican diplomat, Fuentes spent much of his childhood in Washington, D.C., returning every summer to his grandmother's home in Mexico. As Mexico's best-known public intellectual, he served as Ambassador to France in the 1970s. His work was recognized with the most prestigious awards in Spanish letters, including the Miguel de Cervantes Prize, awarded by the King of Spain. He was the first recipient of the Latin Civilization Award, presented jointly by the Presidents of Brazil, Mexico and France. In 1992, he produced and narrated a documentary television series on the history of pan-Hispanic culture, The Buried Mirror. An independent political thinker with a profound instinct for social justice, Carlos Fuentes is one of those rare writers who, by the sheer power of his literary art, defined the cultural and emotional identity of an entire continent.