Alfonso Reyes Ochoa (17 May 1889 in Monterrey, Nuevo León – 27 December 1959 in Mexico City) was a Mexican writer, philosopher and diplomat.

He was the ninth of the twelve children of General Bernardo Reyes Ogazón, Governor of the State of Nuevo León and the Secretary of War and Navy of President Porfirio Díaz (considered by some to be his natural successor), and his wife Aurelia Ochoa-Garibay y Sapién, member of a prominent family of Jalisco, direct descendants of Conquistador Diego de Ochoa-Garibay, as documented by Reyes in his Parentalia.

In 1909, he helped to found the Ateneo de la Juventud, along with other young intellectuals including Martín Luis Guzmán, José Vasconcelos, Julio Torri, and Pedro Enríquez Ureña, to promote new cultural and aesthetic ideals and educational reform in Mexico.

[3] The following year, he wrote the short story La Cena ("The Supper"), which is considered a forerunner of surrealism and Latin American magical realism.

After Germany invaded France in 1914, he moved to Madrid, Spain, and pursued a literary career as journalist, investigator, translator, critic, and writer.

In 1939, he retired from the diplomatic corps and returned to Mexico, where he organized what is today El Colegio de México and dedicated himself to writing and teaching.

In 1919, he was named the Mexican Commission Secretary "Francisco del Paso y Troncoso", the same year that Cantar de mio Cid was put into prose.

After 1924 he developed a diplomatic and social life in Paris, Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro (he served as an ambassador of Mexico to Argentina and Brazil).

His poetic works reveal a profound knowledge of the formal means,[citation needed] notably "Ifigenia cruel" (1924), "Pausa" (1926), "5 casi sonetos" (1931), "Otra voz" (1936) and "Cantata en la tumba de Federico García Lorca" (1937).