Elena Poniatowska
PARIS, 1932
ERNESTO CARDENAL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE 2024
CERVANTES PRIZE 2013
BIBLIOTECA BREVE PRIZE 2011
INTERNATIONAL NOVEL PRIZE RÓMULO GALLEGOS 2007
ALFAGUARA NOVEL PRIZE 2001
She was born Hélène Elizabeth Louise Amélie Paula Dolores Poniatowska Amor in Paris in 1932. The name, unsurprisingly, denotes royal blood, Poniatowska's father being a direct descendant of King Stanislaus II, the last king of Poland. Her mother was a Mexican whose family originally came from France. During the 2nd World War, Poniatowska fled to Mexico with her mother and sister while her father stayed on to fight in the French army. She attended school in the United States, and this was where she later embarked on her outstanding journalistic career. La noche de Tlatelolco (The Night of Tlatelolco, 1971), one of her most famous books, bears witness to the massacre of student protesters in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Mexico in 1968. Her chosen genre is literary journalism, much of which is collected in the 7 volume Todo México (All México, 1991-1999). Her prolific career has won her many awards including the Mazatlán Prize twice for Hasta no verte Jesús mío (Here's to You Jesusa!, 1970) and Tinísima (1992); the Alfaguara Prize for the novel La piel del cielo (The Skin of the Sky, 2001); the Rómulo Gallegos International Prize for the novel El tren pasa primero (The Train Goes First, 2007); and the Biblioteca Breve Prize for Leonora (2011). She has also received the distinction Honoris Causa from several universities. Elena Poniatowska is one of the most powerful and important voices of Spanish American literature and journalism.
Elena Poniatowska Foundation's Website
"With her masterful command of language, Elena Poniatowska has created
a cosmopolitan setting and a perturbing female figure who embodies
the dreams and nightmares of the 20th Century."
JURY OF THE BIBLIOTECA BREVE PRIZE 2011
"Poniatowska has made an art form of blending journalism and fiction."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"She herself has become a literary character... She has a kind of musicality,
fluttering assuredly like the poetry we see in her writing...
She is the bird of Mexican literature.
Octavio Paz
"Poniatowska pays her dues to feminism through the depiction of tense,
powerful figures, browbeaten by accumulated prejudice...
She will be another foreigner in the land of wars and revolutions."
Carlos Monsiváis
"I read her work as a continuity, as pieces of a fresco that help me
to understand the world in which I live. Or the world in which I lived
or wanted to live, in any case, the only one that exists for any of us."
Rosa Beltrán, UNIVERSIDAD DE MÉXICO REVIEW
"An excellent writer."Antonio Muñoz Molina
"She is a woman who has enhanced the Latin American tradition
of combining journalism and literature or literature and journalism.
The order doesn't matter. Time has blurred the boundaries."
Winston Manrique, EL PAÍS
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By Elena Poniatowska
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NOVEL, 2021
Stanisław Poniatowski wanders the halls of his palace in regal solitude. He was recently crowned king, but with the throne came a flood of problems: the royal treasury is heavily in debt, his...
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NOVEL, 2019
Elena Poniatowska's most personal and ambitious novel yet It's 1743 and as he listens carefully to accounts of his family's historic feats, Stanislaw journeys through a breathtaking winter...
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SHORT STORIES, 2017
In Santa Isabel Tola there is an aqueduct that people say is full of tears: all the water that runs along it came from La Llorona. This is where Fernando Alonso lives. His father has shot himself...
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NON FICTION, 2016
Contemporary society is riven by social struggle, especially that of women, who raise their voices from the trenches and will never give up. Women refusing to accept the status quo stand out from...
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NOVEL. SEIX BARRAL, 2015
A diva and muse in her own right, legendary wife, magnificent cook, stormy tempered mother and tragic widow, María Guadalupe Marín Preciado, Lupe Marín (1895-1983), was a...
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SHORT STORIES, 2014
Good stories always bring something of ourselves into play. Their chameleonic properties are both exuberant stimulation and the ultimate expression of our imagination, which refuses to let the...
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BIOGRAPHY, 2013
Ever since his mother first showed him the stars, the fate of Guillermo Haro (1913-1988) has been tied to them. Having dropped out of a legal degree and earned one in philosophy instead, the sky...
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NOVEL. SEIX BARRAL, 2011
BIBLIOTECA BREVE PRIZE 2011 Elena Poniatoswka's exciting novel about the incredible life of British painter Leonora Carrington, the last surrealist to die, is an adventure story, a cry for...
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NON FICTION, 2009
The legendary story of how seven families occupied land in Morelos in 1973 and ended up building a settlement of fifteen thousand people led by Güero Medrano in an unprecedented experiment in...
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POETRY, 2008
There comes a time in life when games and songs lose their innocence. An educated but mischievous girl who plays the piano, practices fencing and fights with her sister endures a traumatic...
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CHILDREN'S BOOK, 2008
The gardens of the neighbourhood of Chimalistac, in the south of Mexico City, witness the love of a lemon tree for a Jacaranda. Unfortunately, the Jacaranda is in love with an ash tree and the...
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NOVEL, 2007
INTERNATIONAL NOVEL PRIZE RÓMULO GALLEGOS 2007 Trinidad Pineda Chiñas from Oaxaca, Mexico learned at an early age that he was gifted, not with beauty or physical strength, but...
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NOVEL, 2007
Poniatowska chronicles the recent case of Paulina through a montage of dialog, description, and photographs. After being raped, the 13-year-old attempts to obtain a constitutionally legal...
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Nothing and no one. The voices of earthquake
NON FICTION, 2006.
The 19th and 20th of September 1985 were days of great pain for the residents of Mexico City. The earth shook and the reverberations ransacked the great city without mercy. Death and destruction....
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NARRATIVE, 2003.
In a city tlapalería hardware store one hears, sees and smells the joyful hustle and bustle of the neighbourhoods but also the petty squabbles and gossip that lend colour to our collective...
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NOVEL, 2001
ALFAGUARA NOVEL PRIZE 2001 A story about the secret side of humanity, the one that hides all passions and emotions. La piel del cielo, like a telescope, brings us closer to the mystery of the...
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NON FICTION, 2000
Wonderful, fierce, crazy to some and unique to all, these artists, painters, writers and muses forged lives of passion, sensitivity, commitment and pain. Frida Kahlo and her mutilated body on the...
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Octavio Paz. The Words of the Tree
BIOGRAPHY, 1998
Elena Poniatowska presents an intimate portrait of Octavio Paz based on conversations, memories, letters and snippets of poems. She tells the poet's story, offering her own version of their time...
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NOVELA, 1996
Ashby Egbert is a member of the Mexican upper classes and that is how he was brought up. He never thinks to question his upbringing until he suffers an accident while his parents are away and must...
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NARRATIVE, 1994
Light and Big and Little Moons takes us on a tour of some of the most eccentric and charming characters in Mexican culture. The odd vernacular of Mexican street vendors, the exuberant...
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NOVEL, 1993
Using quotations from actual letters, characters under their actual names, and events straight out of history, Mexican novelist Elena Poniatowska has reimagined the life of actress and Communist...
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NON FICTION, 1991-2002
Seven volumes in which are gathered all her works of literary journalism.
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NOVEL, 1988
Mariana, the narrator of this novel, is a Duchess who spends her early years in France among valets, butlers and monogrammed crockery. This charmed existence comes to an abrupt end with the advent...
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NON FICTION, 1980
The act of resistance far transcends the indignation with which it began. It is a means of going out to meet one's fate, a final, desperate demand for justice. Migrants who come to the big city to...
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SHORT STORIES, 1979
In the story that lends its name to this collection, the ease with which Esmeralda - who has just been exposed as a bigamist - carries herself stuns an agent from the Public Ministry who can't...
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NOVEL, 1978
The Russian exile and painter Angelina Beloff writes from the cold and impoverished post-war Paris to Diego Rivera, her spouse of over ten years. Beloff sends these letters to which there is no...
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NON FICTION, 1971
One of her most famous books, bears witness to the massacre of student protesters in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Mexico in 1968.
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NOVEL, 1969
Left motherless and with a roaming father in impoverished turn-of-the-century Oaxaca, Jesusa is married at age 15 to an abusive cavalry captain during the Mexican revolution. Always a tomboy, she...
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CHILDREN'S NOVEL, 1954
Composed of an illustrated novella, four stories and a critical essay, this collection introduces English-speaking readers to experimental Mexican writer Poniatowska, whose body of work has earned...
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