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Carlos Fuentes is seen during a lecture at the Universidad Veracruzana in Veracruz on October 28, 2009 |
Carlos Fuentes, who died on Tuesday aged 83, was one of the Spanish-speaking world’s best known writers, famous for his prolific output and his use of experimental language.
President Felipe Calderon announced the writer’s death in a message on his Twitter account. The National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature confirmed he had died in a Mexico City hospital.
The author’s doctor Arturo Ballesteros told reporters that Fuentes had died after suffering a massive hemorrhage in his digestive tract in the home in the early hours of Tuesday.
Yesterday, a tribute to Fuentes washeld at the Palacio Nacional de Bellas Artes in the capital, with his casket on display, the institute said.
Arguably Mexico’s best known contemporary author, Fuentes, the son of a diplomat, was born in Panama City on November 11, 1928. He spent parts of his childhood in Quito, Montevideo and Rio de Janeiro, and was enrolled in a US public school when his father was transferred to Washington.
“You have to take some time out to be able to give literature the attention it deserves – for journalism, for speaking, for friendship. I cannot be cloistered like a monk because I would lose contact with human beings, with life,” Fuentes told AFP in a 2003 interview.
A leading figure in the 1960s Latin American literature boom. Fuentes befriended both Colombian leftist Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Peruvian conservative Mario Vargas Llosa, and was known for criticising both capitalism and communism.
Unlike his contemporaries though, Fuentes never won a Nobel Prize in literature.
In 1958, when he was 30, he achieved international renown with The Most Transparent Region, a portrayal of Mexico City’s explosive growth.
The late author is survived by his second wife, journalist Silvia Lemus, and a daughter from his first marriage to the late actress Rita Macedo.
Carlos Rafael and Natasha, his two children from his marriage with Lemus, died before him.