CHILEAN poet Nicanor Parra, who died recently aged 103, repeatedly scared the Nobel Prize for Literature bureaucracy shitless. It invented lame excuses every time somebody had him nominated and his name went forward on four occasions.

But his prestige was never in doubt with his millions of readers throughout Latin America and beyond.

The oldest of eight siblings in a prolific artistic family — a sister was the legendary singer Violeta Parra — he was a true polymath but the only child the family could afford to educate.