Paris (France) (AFP) – From the bustling literary cafes of Montparnasse to the National Library of France, where part of his personal archive is located, including the diploma and the Nobel Prize for Literature, Paris deeply marked the Guatemalan writer Miguel Ángel Asturias.

First modification: 03/11/2026 - 16:11

Promoter of magical realism and great defender of the indigenous world, Asturias (1899-1974) was buried in the famous Parisian cemetery of Père-Lachaise. After more than half a century, his remains will be transferred next week to his native Guatemala.

The writer lived in the French capital for several periods, mainly between 1923 and 1933, a crucial stage for his training, and then as ambassador, between 1966 and 1970.

In his early Parisian years, he enrolled at the Sorbonne to study pre-Columbian myths, and worked as a correspondent for multiple newspapers, including Guatemala's El Imparcial.

"This city has an old river in which no one bathes, churches in which no one prays, palaces in which no one lives," he writes about Paris in one of his articles.

In that interwar era, the City of Light was an artistic epicenter and Asturias was nourished by this effervescence.

Literary cafes

He frequented literary cafés, especially in the Montparnasse neighborhood, such as La Rotonde, where he interviewed the Spanish writer Miguel de Unamuno, or La Coupole, where he met another writer, Ramón Gómez de la Serna, and the painters Juan Gris and George Braque. I used to see Pablo Picasso at the Jockey.

In this context of artistic ebullition, "all these movements were discussed in the literary cafes of Paris where my father attended permanently," explains his son Miguel Ángel Asturias Amado in a recent video on social networks.

"He was forming and there also creating the path that he was going to take regarding literature," he says.

While in Paris, Asturias published his first book, "Leyendas de Guatemala" (1930) and had already "almost finished", as the writer said in an interview, his best-known novel: "El Señor Presidente" (1946), inspired by the dictatorship of Manuel Estrada Cabrera (1898-1920) and which is considered one of the first works about autocrats that later proliferated so much in Latin American literature.

In his later stage as a diplomat, now as an established writer, two events marked his stay.

While in Paris in 1966, he received the Lenin Peace Prize, awarded by the Soviet Union.

A year later, he received world recognition with the Nobel Prize in Literature.

As he explained, it was announced to him on his birthday, October 19, at the embassy, ​​then located not far from the Champs-Elysées.

These two distinctions are currently in the National Library of France (BnF) and are part of the personal archive that the writer himself decided to bequeath to this institution.

This collection includes manuscripts, correspondence, drawings, writings about speeches and various objects, such as a cane with sculptures on the handle.

"The genesis"

Among the documents, 56 notebooks of different sizes stand out, with notes for his works, notes on his travels...

"They cover a very broad period of writing. They are the place where the genesis of the works, the evolution of Asturian thought, is stated and shown," explains Laurence Le Bras, head of the department of modern and contemporary manuscripts at the BnF, to AFP.

"They are the master pieces of this collection," he adds, specifying that in total the Asturias archives at the institution, coming from his Parisian apartment, occupy some 150 conservation boxes.

This collection also includes drawings -- "very representative of magical realism," according to Le Bras --, where birds, characters from legends or caricatures appear, made on pieces of paper of all kinds, including tablecloths.

"Asturias greatly appreciated his drawings, since in some cases they are pasted on larger sheets, sometimes grouped thematically," explains the expert.

Two years before his death in Madrid, the author of "Men of Corn" already expressed his wish that he wanted to bequeath this Parisian archive to the BnF, according to correspondence from the time.

"He had a very strong attachment to France, which was the base where he was formed intellectually, and he wanted to materialize that attachment through the donation of his archives," says Le Bras.

© 2026 AFP

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