Professor Gets Guatemala Award

Seymour Menton, a research professor of Spanish and Portuguese and founder of UC Irvine’s department of foreign languages and literatures, has received Guatemala’s prestigious Miguel Angel Asturias Order.

The award was named after Guatemala’s most distinguished novelist, who received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1967. Menton traveled to Guatemala recently to accept the award at the National Palace.

Menton, who has taught for 50 years and is an original UCI faculty member, was honored for his research on Latin American literature, particularly for his critical history of the Guatemalan novel, published in 1960 with an updated edition in 1985.