Alejo Carpentier is a leading Latin American intellectual whose work has had a lasting impact on subsequent writing from the region. Journalist, novelist, poet, musicologist, art critic and meticulous historian, his work and his distinct baroque style have left a significant contribution and were particularly influential for the Latin American “Boom” generation, most notably Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez.
Even though Carpentier claimed for most of his life to have been born in Havana, Cuba, a fact that remains recorded in many biographies on the author, later researchers found that he was born in Lausanne, Switzerland, of a French architect father and a Russian mother who was a language teacher, who travelled to Cuba while Carpentier was an infant (see González
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Citation: Lavoie, Sophie M.. "Alejo Carpentier". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 11 February 2010 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=751, accessed 21 November 2024.]
