Winner of the 1967 Nobel Prize for literature, Asturias spent his child in a rural town, where his family fled to escape political persecution in Guatemala City. His adolescence under a repressive dictatorship shaped all his work--chiefly novels and short stories. Asturias is widely regarded as the father of magic realism, and was an important influence on Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In 1966, he was named ambassador to France by a less intolerant Guatemalan government.
