SOURCE: Durán, Manuel. “Octavio Paz: Nobel Laureate in Literature, 1990.” World Literature Today 65, no. 1 (winter 1991): 5-7.

In the following essay, Durán offers an overview of the works and career of Paz shortly after the poet was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1990.

A welcome surprise, a pleasant surprise: this is how most readers and critics have received the news of the awarding of the 1990 Nobel Prize in Literature to Octavio Paz. The element of surprise was due mostly to the fact that no one, or almost no one, thought that a Nobel could be accorded to a Hispanic writer so soon after the 1989 selection of the Spanish novelist Camilo José Cela.¹ After all, this is not the way—or so we surmised—the Swedish Academy thinks and acts: after an award to a representative of a certain cultural or linguistic area, attention is displaced to another...