Mutis, Álvaro

Álvaro Mutis was born in Bogotà, Colombia. Like many other Latin American authors he comes from a multicultural family. His father, Santiago Mutis Dávila, was a diplomat. The family moved to Brussels when Álvaro Mutis was two years old, but they continued to spend their holidays in Colombia. Memories of three-week-long journeys by sea, horse and train informed Mutis writing as well as the landscape, the climate, the scented fruit trees and the coffee plantations on his grandfather's country estate, Coello, in the mountainous Tolima district. Mutis later said that everything he had written paid tribute to his grandfather's estate.