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Álvaro Mutis Jaramillo (born August 25, 1923) is a Colombian poet, novelist, and essayist. Before returning to Colombia in his adolescence, he lived in Brussels, where his father held a post as a diplomat. He has lived in Mexico City since 1956.

Though critically acclaimed worldwide and translated into many languages, his works are most widely read in Latin America and Europe. Mutis is best known for his novellas featuring Maqroll el Gaviero (Maqroll the Lookout), a wandering sailor and adventurer. These have been gathered into a compendium, The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll (ISBN 0940322919, translated into English by Edith Grossman). Typical praise by Mutis' contemporaries includes: "An amazing adventure full of poetry, a narrative craft and a subtle philosophical content make of the Maqroll saga a major work of the literature written in Spanish." His close friend and famous novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez called Mutis "One of the greatest writers of our time."

His poetry was first published in 1948, his first short stories in 1978, but it was his first novel featuring Maqroll, La nieve del Almirante (The Snow of the Admiral), published in 1986, that first gained him popular and critical acclaim. He has received many literary awards, including the Prix Médicis (France, 1989), Premio Príncipe de Asturias de las Letras (Spain, 1997), Premio Miguel de Cervantes (Spain, 2001), and the Neustadt Prize for Literature (United States, 2002).

Mutis has combined his career as a writer of poetry and prose with a diverse set of non-literary occupations. Like his protagonist Maqroll, Mutis traveled widely in his professional roles including five years as Standard Oil's public relations director, and over 20 years as sales manager for Twentieth Century Fox and Columbia Pictures in their Latin American television divisions. Latin Americans first became familiar with his voice when he did the narration for the Spanish-language television version of The Untouchables.

Mutis is a contemporary of other notable Latin American writers such as Gabriel García Márquez and the late Octavio Paz, who championed Mutis' early poetry. In the 1950s, Mutis spent 15 months in a Mexican prison as a consequence of his handling of money intended for charitable use by Standard Oil. His experience in prison had a lasting influence on his life and work, and is chronicled in the book Diario de Lecumberri.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Alvaro Mutis", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0