 As scholar Richard Jewell notes, there had been substantial criticism that Latin American writers were being ignored by the Nobel committee.Beginning with Miguel Ángel Asturias in 1967, however, the academy selected four Latin American writers within twenty-four years.Biographer Gregory Rabassa, who has translated other works by Asturias, highlights the effects of the Nobel Prize on Asturias's subsequent work, saying, "[h]is winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1967 gave him a long-awaited financial independence that ... enabled him to withdraw to his writing and the many aims and possibilities that [had] been on his mind for so many years".