Álvaro Mutis Jaramillo was born on August 25, 1923 in Bogota, Colombia. He lived in Brussels, Belgium before returning to Colombia in his adolescence. He moved to Mexico City in 1956. During his life in Brussels his father held a post as a diplomat which is why he lived there at the time.

In the 1950s, Mutis spent 15 months in a Mexican prison due to his handling of money intended for charitable use by Standard Oil. His experience in prison had a lasting influence on his life and work, and is chronicled in the book Diario de Lecumberri. Mutis has combined his career as a writer of poetry and prose with a diverse set of non-literary occupations. Mutis traveled widely in his professional roles including five years as Standard Oil's public relations director, and over 20 years as sales manager for Twentieth Century Fox and Columbia Pictures in their Latin American television divisions. Latin Americans first became familiar with his voice when he did the narration for the Spanish-language television version of The Untouchables.

During the nine years of their stay in Brussels, Mutis’ father took the family on annual boat-trips to Colombia to spend the holidays at his father’s coffee hacienda. For Alvaro Mutis, the impressions of these early years are the main spring of his work. The whole family were avid readers, and in the library of his grandfather young Alvaro could lose himself in the complete works of Jules Verne. It was on reading Pablo Neruda’s ‘Residencia en la tierra’ (Residence on Earth) that Mutis decided to become a poet himself. He also felt close affinity with the work of Saint-John Perse and the surrealists. In 1948 the newspaper La Razón printed his first ‘real’ poem, ‘Fear’. There is no political message in Mutis’ work. He says of himself that he has no head for politics so his contribution to society is mostly entertainment. He is, if anything, a supporter of ‘absolute monarchy, although, unfortunately, it no longer exists’. He takes a keen interest in history, an interest that is clearly reflected in his poetry and prose.

He published his first works of poetry and criticism in "El Espectador" newspaper of Bogotá which won him the 1987 Prince of Asturias Award for Communications-. Since his first book of poems, "La Balanza" (in collaboration with Carlos Patinos), was published in 1947, many more of his works of poetry have appeared, notably "Los trabajos perdidos", "Caravansay", "Los emisarios", and "Los trabajos prohibidos", in addition to novels such as "La mansión de Araucaíma", "Amirbar", "Un bel morir", and "Iona llega con la lluvia". Some of these books have been translated into various languages (English, French, Italian, German, Portuguese, etc.). In 1953 "Los elementos del desastre" was published in Buenos Aires, for the first time introducing Maqroll el Gaviero, a personage who would continue to occupy a place in almost all of Mutis´s later poetic and narrative work. In 1996 a compilation of the Maqroll stories was presented in Mexico under the title of "Empresas y tribulaciones de Maqroll el Gaviero". Winner of France´s Prix Medicis and Colombia´s National Award for Letters, among many other honors, Álvaro Mutis is a honorary doctor of the Universidad del Valle (Colombia) and has been the recipient of such distinctions as the Order of Arts and Letters of France, the Águila Azteca of Mexico, and the Grand Cross of Alfonso X the Wise of Spain.




If we ever met Álvaro Mutis in real life some questions we would ask him would be:
1. Where did you get your inspiration for writing poems?
2. When did you start writing novels?
3. Do you regret any of the things you have done in life? What are they?
4. What was your time in prison like?
5. What was your childhood like?