Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda was the pen name of Chilean poet and diplomat Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto, one of the most internationally influential Latin American writers of the twentieth century. Born in 1904, he achieved early fame with Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair and later developed the darker, experimental poetry of Residence on Earth. Diplomatic postings exposed him to Asia, Europe and Latin America, while the Spanish Civil War strengthened his commitment to left-wing and Communist politics.

Neruda served as a Chilean senator, joined the Communist Party and went into hiding and exile after the party was outlawed under President Gabriel González Videla. His vast Canto General combined poetry, history and politics across the Americas. He returned to public life, supported Salvador Allende and received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971. Neruda died on 23 September 1973, twelve days after the military coup; the circumstances of his final illness have remained a subject of investigation and public controversy, alongside wider reassessment of aspects of his personal life.

In Isabel Allende’s A Long Petal of the Sea, A marriage of necessity allows them to join the Winnipeg, the ship organised by Pablo Neruda to carry Spanish refugees to Chile.