Mexican author Carlos Fuentes spoke about his new book, The Years with Laura Diaz, his literary influences, and Mexican politics at the Askwith Lecture Hall on Friday evening.

The talk by Fuentes, a renowned contemporary Latin American author, drew over 300 Harvard students, faculty members, as well as representatives from the Mexican and Argentine consuls.

In his speech, Fuentes discussed how politics had influenced his writing. As a child, he traveled throughout Latin America because his father was a Mexican diplomat. He attended the Washington, D.C. elementary schools.

"I felt the vibrancy of D.C. and the U.S. under Roosevelt," he said.

His time in Chile, which he said was one of the most democratic countries in Latin America, was when "politics and poetry came together" due to the influence of poets such as Pablo Neruda, he said. It was in this setting that he wrote his first novel at 13.

Avoiding Argentine schools that Fuentes said "fed an ideology of fascism and anti-Semitism," he took a year off and wandered the streets of Buenos Aires, where he discovered tango and the great Spanish writer Jorge Luis Borges.

Fuentes emphasized the importance of his choice to write in Spanish, a decision he came to after reading Don Quixote for the first time at age 14.

"I only dream in Spanish, make love in Spanish and insult in Spanish," he said.