Pablo Neruda is remembered as the world’s greatest romantic poet, yet the same man fled Chile on horseback through a snowy Andes pass as a hunted political fugitive. This episode traces the Chilean writer, diplomat and senator chronologically, from the boy born Ricardo Eliezer Neftali Reyes Basualto who invented a pen name to shield his poetry from a hostile father, to the lonely consul posted to Burma, Ceylon and Indonesia, to the Madrid years where the execution of his friend Federico Garcia Lorca pushed him into lifelong communism.

The story follows his rescue of more than 2,000 Spanish refugees aboard the Winnipeg, his abandonment of his first wife and disabled daughter Malva Marina, the visa he secured for a man involved in the attack on Leon Trotsky, his odes to Stalin, the 1948 I Accuse speech that made him a wanted man, the CIA campaign against his Nobel Prize, and his death twelve days after the 1973 Pinochet coup. It closes with the exhumation that found Clostridium botulinum in a molar, the reopened forensic inquiry, and the 2018 airport-renaming protests over passages in his own memoirs.

• How a teenage pen name became a survival mechanism and a global literary identity
• The Winnipeg refugee rescue set against the abandonment of his daughter in occupied Netherlands
• The Trotsky assassin visa, the Stalin Peace Prize and the break with Octavio Paz
• Thirteen months underground, the Andes escape and three years of stateless exile
• The botulinum finding, the reopened inquiry and the feminist reckoning with his memoirs