Alejo Carpentier

Who is Alejo Carpentier?

Alejo Carpentier was a Cuban novelist, essayist, and musicologist who became one of the most influential Latin American writers of the twentieth century. Raised in Havana in a French and Russian immigrant household, he trained in music before turning to journalism and literature, and was briefly imprisoned in Cuba in the 1920s for his opposition to the Machado dictatorship. During years spent in France in the 1930s, he absorbed European Surrealism while developing his own concept of "lo real maravilloso" (the marvelous real), articulated in the prologue to his 1949 novel "El reino de este mundo" (The Kingdom of This World), set during the Haitian Revolution. This idea, describing the extraordinary as an inherent part of Latin American history and landscape, is considered a direct forerunner of the magical realism later associated with writers such as Gabriel García Márquez. His other major works include "Los pasos perdidos" (The Lost Steps, 1953) and "El siglo de las luces" (Explosion in a Cathedral, 1962). Carpentier served as a cultural diplomat for Cuba after 1959 and received the Miguel de Cervantes Prize, Spanish letters' highest honor, in 1977. He died in Paris in 1980.

Sources: Alejo Carpentier, prologue to El reino de este mundo (1949) · Fundación Premio Cervantes, laureate record (1977) · Roberto González Echevarría, Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home (1977)