Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda was the pen name and, later, legal name of the Chilean poetdiplomat and politician Ricardo Elicer Neftal Reyes Basoalto . He derived his pen name from the Czech poet Jan Neruda. Neruda won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971.

Pablo Neruda was born on July 12, 1904, in Parral, Chile, a city in Linares Province in the Maule Region, some 350160km south of Santiago, to Jos del Carmen Reyes Morales, a railway employee, and Rosa Basoalto, a school teacher who died one month after he was born. Soon after her death, Reyes moved to Temuco, where he married Trinidad Candia Marverde, a woman with whom he had had another child nine years earlier, a boy named Rodolfo. Neruda grew up in Temuco with Rodolfo and a halfsister, Laura, one of his fathers children by another woman. He composed his first poems in the winter of 1914.

Source: Wikipedia