Alvaro Mutis, a Colombian poet, novelist, short-story writer, and essayist, has been selected as the winner of the 2002 Neustadt International Prize for Literature by an international jury of ten authors.
Mutis is the fourth Latin American and the second Colombian-born author to win the prize.  Although he writes in Spanish, his works have been widely translated into most of the major languages and many of the smaller languages of the world.  His works have been regularly reviewed in World Literature Today for more than 20 years. Mutis is best known for his award-winning novellas published in the United States in two collections, Maqroll and The Adventures of Maqroll. (Now available as The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll from the New York Review of Books.)

“Alvaro Mutis is one of the most beloved, respected, and celebrated of Latin American authors in the Spanish-speaking world and in Europe," observes David Clark, World Literature Today's editor. Robert Con Davis-Undiano, Dolores and Walter Neustadt Professor of Comparative Literature and executive director of World Literature Today adds that "Mutis is phenomenal, and I hope the Neustadt Prize will bring a whole new readership to discover the wit, intelligence and broad range of his work." 

A special issue of World Literature Today will be dedicated to Mutis’s life and literary production.  A symposium of his work was presented on 17-18 October by a distinguished panel consisting of James Alstrum (scholar, Illinois State University), Edith Grossman (scholar/translator, New York), Gerald Martin (scholar, University of Pittsburgh), Alastair Reid (poet/translator/writer, New York), and William Siemens (scholar, Santa Barbara, California). Mutis received the Neustadt Prize during official ceremonies at the University of Oklahoma on 18 October 2002.