Pablo Neruda, born as Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto, was a Chilean poet-diplomat and politician who won the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is often considered the national poet of Chile, and his works have been popular and influential worldwide. Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez once called him "the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language", and critic Harold Bloom included Neruda as one of the writers central to the Western tradition in his book The Western Canon.

Neruda became known as a poet at the young age of 13 and wrote in a variety of styles, including surrealist poems, historical epics, political manifestos, a prose autobiography, and passionate love poems such as those in his collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924). He occupied many diplomatic positions in various countries during his lifetime and served a term as a senator for the Chilean Communist Party.

When President Gabriel González Videla outlawed communism in Chile in 1948, a warrant was issued for Neruda's arrest. Friends hid him for months in the basement of a house in the port city of Valparaíso. In 1949, he escaped to Argentina through a mountain pass near Maihue Lake and would not return to Chile for more than three years. He was a close advisor to Chile's socialist president Salvador Allende and was invited to read at the Estadio Nacional before 70,000 people upon returning to Chile after accepting his Nobel Prize.

In September 1973, Neruda was hospitalized with cancer. During the coup d'état led by Augusto Pinochet that overthrew Allende's government, he returned home from the hospital after suspecting a doctor of attempting to murder him on Pinochet's orders. He died at his home in Isla Negra on 23 September 1973, just hours after leaving the hospital. Although initially reported to have died of heart failure, recent investigations suggest the possibility that he was killed as a result of "the intervention of third parties".