Mexican Writer Octavio Paz Wins Nobel

Mexican writer Octavio Paz, a onetime diplomat whose poems and essays amalgamate a variety of cultures, won the 1990 Nobel Literature Prize today.

The Swedish Academy of Letters said Paz, 76, got the $700,000 award “for impassioned writing with wide horizons, characterized by sensuous intelligence and humanistic integrity.”

“I am very grateful to the committee,” Paz said when reached by telephone at a New York hotel. He was in the United States to deliver a lecture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“I am very happy,” he said. “This is something very important for me and for Mexican and Spanish-American literature.”

In perhaps his best-known book, “The Labyrinth of Solitude,” Paz, who once called himself a “disillusioned leftist,” offers a controversial and often startling analysis of modern Mexico and the Mexican personality.

The Academy, guardian of the world’s premier literary award, said that in choosing Paz, a longtime contender, it was “honoring a writer of Spanish with a wide international perspective.”

Born in Mexico City on March 31, 1914, Paz attended the National University of Mexico before going abroad as a diplomat. He wrote poetry and essays in his free time.

“Paz’s poetry and essays evolve from an intractable but fruitful union of cultures; pre-Columbian Indian, the Spanish Conquistadors and Western modernism,” the Academy said.