Colombian Alvaro Mutis is a prolific and world-renowned poet, novelist, and essayist whose work has been translated into English, French, Italian, German, Dutch, Portuguese, Swedish, Romanian, and Turkish. He has received several literary awards: Colombia's national prize for letters in 1974; the Mexican prizes Crítica de Los Abriles in 1985 and the Xavier Villarrutia award in 1988; France's Medicis Prize for the best book translated into French in 1989; Italy's Nonino Prize in 1990; the French Roger Caillois Prize in 1993; and Spain's Príncipe de Asturias de las Letras Prize and the Reina de Sofía Prize in poetry, both in 1997.

The jury for the Spanish prizes stated that Mutis's prose and poetry are recognized worldwide as distinctively joining magic realism with the problems of contemporary humanity. Mutis, however, rejects the term "magic realism," a category he considers to have been created by European critics unfamiliar with the reality...