Miguel Ángel Asturias Rosales (October 19, 1899 – June 9, 1974) was a Guatemalan writer and diplomat. He was born in Guatemala City, moved to at the age of five, and died in Madrid, Spain.

In 1904 his family moved from the capital to Salamá, Baja Verapaz, where they remained until 1908. In 1917, while studying law at the Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala (after a brief one-year flirtation with medicine), Asturias participated in the 1920 uprising against dictator Manuel Estrada Cabrera. He graduated in 1923 and went to Paris, France, to further his education at the Sorbonne. While living in Paris, he was influenced by the gathering of writers and artists in Montparnasse, and began writing poetry and fiction.

Asturias returned to Guatemala in 1933 where he worked as a journalist before serving in his country's diplomatic corps. When the government of President Jacobo Arbenz fell in 1954, he was banned from the country by Carlos Castillo Armas. While living in exile he became a well known author with the release of his novel, Mulata. Eventually, in 1966, democratically elected President Julio César Méndez Montenegro appointed him the ambassador to France, the same year he won the Lenin Peace Prize.

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