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); the Biblioteca Breve Prize for Leonora (2011), the Cervantes Prize 2013 and the Ernesto Cardenal prize 2024. 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 Magazine
“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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