- Was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971.
- Children: Malva Marina (b.1934, d.1942)
- Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez considers him the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language.
- Federico García Lorca was a primary influence on his style. The two poets were close friends up until Lorca's execution during the Spanish Civil War.
- Biography/bibliography in: "Contemporary Authors". New Revision Series, Vol. 131, pages 321-330. Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale, 2005.
- The love poetry Patch Adams (Robin Williams) reads to Corinne Fisher (Monica Potter) in Patch Adams (1998) was from Neruda's "100 Love Sonnets : Cien sonetos de amor".
- Kenneth Rexroth's translation of Neruda's 1955 poem "Brown and Agile Child" is shown on the back cover of Jackson Browne's 1976 album "The Pretender".
- Adopted the pen name Pablo Neruda as a tribute to Czech writer and poet Jan Neruda (1834-1891).
- Neruda died 12 days after Augusto Pinochet's military coup toppled the democratically elected government of President Salvador Allende. In 2013, Chilean judge Mario Carroza ordered the exhumation of Neruda's remains after his chauffeur, Manuel Araya, told the Mexican magazine Proceso that the poet had called him in desperation from the hospital to say that he had been injected in the stomach while he was asleep. Samples of Neruda's remains were sent to forensic genetics laboratories in four countries for analysis and in 2015 the Chilean government said that it was "highly probable that a third party" was responsible for his death. 16 scientists unanimously rejected the cause of death noted on Neruda's death certificate, cancer cachexia, which involves significant weight loss. "That cannot be correct," said Dr Niels Morling of the University of Copenhagen's department of forensic medicine, who took part in the analysis. "There was no indication of cachexia. He was an obese man at the time of death. All other circumstances in his last phase of life pointed to some kind of infection." The day before the poet's death, the then Mexican ambassador to Chile, Gonzalo Martínez Corbalá, visited the poet in hospital and told him there was a plane waiting on the runway at Santiago airport to fly him to safety in Mexico, where he would receive the best available treatment for his cancer. Neruda hesitated, saying he would prefer to wait two days, but died the next day. Proponents of the poisoning hypothesis maintain that, as a prominent communist, Neruda would have been an influential voice of opposition to the military junta from exile and that he was murdered to prevent him from leaving Chile. The tests on the samples continued. [The Guardian, Oct. 2017].
- Is portrayed by Philippe Noiret in The Postman (1994).
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