Honorary Fellow Nicanor Parra dies at 103

It is with sadness we share the news that Chilean poet and physicist Nicanor Parra has died, aged 103, at his home in Las Cruces.

Nicanor, who described himself as an ‘anti-poet’, shunned traditional poetic techniques and styles, and was one of Latin America’s most influential contemporary writers. In 2011 he was awarded the Cervantes Prize, the most prestigious literary prize in the Spanish-speaking world, and he was proposed on four occasions for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

A mathematician and physicist as well as a poet, Nicanor was an alumnus of St Catherine’s Society (preceding the College), matriculating in 1949 and going on to teach theoretical physics at the University of Chile for almost four decades. He was awarded an Honorary Fellowship at St Catz in 2000.

The University of Oxford Spanish sub-faculty is running a series of events to mark Nicanor Parra’s life and works. See details below:

Michaelmas Term 2018, date TBC: Niall Binns, poet, Oxford alumnus, and expert in Latin American literature, will deliver a talk.

(Photo: Alamy)