Joaquín Gutiérrez Mangel (30 March 1918 – 16 October 2000) was a Costa Rican writer who won multiple awards, and whose children's book Cocorí has been translated into ten languages.

In addition to writing children's books, Gutiérrez was a chess champion, war correspondent, journalist, story-teller, translator, professor, and communist activist.

He began working there while also contributing to Frente Popular (People's Front) and El Siglo (The Century), two leftist newspapers.

He even arranged for Soviet spy Iosif Grigulevich to obtain a falsified Costa Rican passport in 1949, under the name Teodoro B. Castro.

Chilean President Salvador Allende put Gutiérrez in charge of Editora Nacional Quimantú, a publisher that focused on literature for the working class in that country.

While writing his own books and stories, he also translated and published Shakespeare's King Lear in 1981, Macbeth in 1986, Julius Caesar in 1994, as well as Hamlet.

[10] Gutiérrez remained politically active, even running for vice-president two times with Pueblo Unido (People's United), a leftist coalition party.

[citation needed] Along with famous Costa Rican writers Fabián Dobles, Yolanda Oreamuno, Carlos Luis Fallas, and Carmen Lyra, Gutiérrez was considered a member of "the '40s Generation."

Many of the writers were active military and political participants in the Costa Rican Civil War, although Gutiérrez was in the United States and Chile at the time.

[11] He became a close friend of poet Pablo Neruda,[1] who would write an introduction to Gutiérrez's 1968 book, La hoja de aire.

[3] His novel Puerto Limón, published in 1950, took place during the United Fruit strike of 1934, a common theme of the '40s Generation authors, such as Carlos Luis Fallas.

[citation needed] In Costa Rica, Gutiérrez received the Magón National Prize for Culture, was awarded a chair in the Academia Costarricense de la Lengua (Costa Rican Language Academy),[15] and was named by the newspaper, La Nación, as the most important national literary figure of the twentieth century.

[3] To honor his contributions to literature, a bust of Gutiérrez was the first statue to be placed in "El Paseo de los Artistas" (The Walk of Artists) outside the gardens of the National Theater in downtown San José.