Elena Poniatowska – författare

Elena Poniatowska is recognised today as one of Mexico's greatest writers. 'Lilus Kikus,' published in 1954, was her first book. However, it was labelled a children's book because it had a young girl as protagonist, it included illustrations, and the author was an unknown woman. 'Lilus Kikus' has not received the critical attention or a translation into English it deserved, until now. Accompanying 'Lilus Kikus' in this first American edition are four of Poniatowska's short stories with female protagonists, only one of which has been previously published in English. Poniatowska is admired today as a feminist, but in 1954, when 'Lilus Kikus' appeared, feminism didn't have broad appeal. Twenty-first-century readers will be fascinated by the way Poniatowska uses her child protagonist to point out the flaws in adult society. Each of the drawings by the great surrealist Leonora Carrington that accompany the chapters in 'Lilus Kikus' expresses a subjective, interiorised vision of the child character's contemplations on life.

For this fictionalized account of the life of Tina Modotti (1896-1942), Elena Poniatowska devoted ten years of research to fully understand the woman who was so caught up in the social and political turbulence of the pre-World War II decades. At different times in her life, Modotti was a silent screen actress, a model for Diego Rivera's murals, and a lover of photographer Edward Weston. She was also a champion for the Mexican people who lovingly referred to her as Tinisima. In 1929, Modotti was accused of the murder of Julio Antonio Mella, her Cuban lover. She fled to the U.S.S.R. to escape the Mexican press and then to Europe, where she became a Soviet secret agent and a nurse under an assumed name, returning to Mexico to meet an early death at the age of forty-five.

When Diego Rivera's biographer, Bertram Wolfe, was sifting though the painter's jumbled collection of correspondence, he encountered a series of Parisian letters from Angelina Beloff. Long before Diego had become famous for his Mexican murals or applauded for his renowned wife, Frida Kahlo, Angelina had been his wife for over ten years while the young Rivera had lived as a poor and obscure artist in the city of light. Wolfe was impressed by the letters Beloff wrote to her husband after his definitive departure for Mexico and included a chapter on them and the Russian painter in his biography of the muralist. Several years later, Mexican author Elena Poniatowska read Wolfe's biography and, deeply impressed by Angelina Beloff's letters, decided to rewrite them. The result is Querido Diego, te abraza Quiela , a masterful blending of fact and fiction that creates a novella out of twelve imagined letters that Quiela (Angelina) writes to Diego over a nine-month period. Within them, we are able to view the artist's world of post-war Paris where Quiela struggles forward without her husband while falling back onto fond memories of their time spent together as well as suffering the torment of darker moments she also lived with the painter. It offers the reader a beautiful portrait of life and art in an iconic city towards the beginning of the 20th century. This brief work exhibits some of the fundamental traits encountered in Poniatowska's narratives: a focus on strong women, an interest in the real and the marginal and a love for Mexico. While translations of this narrative do exist in various languages, Nathanial Gardner's bilingual edition is a new initiative that introduces the reader to the work of one of Mexico's most celebrated female writers and assists the student and enthusiast understand this author's place and importance in Latin American letters.Elena Poniatowska was been awarded the prestigious Premio Cervantes (Cervantes Prize) on 23rd of April2014, the anniversary of the death of Miguel de Cervantes.

With contributions from seven of Mexico's finest journalists, this is reportage at its bravest and most necessary - it has the power to change the world's view of their country, and by the force of its truth, to start to heal the country's many sorrows.Supported the Arts Council Grant's for the Arts Programme and by PEN PromotesVeering between carnival and apocalypse, Mexico has in the last ten years become the epicentre of the international drug trade. The so-called "war on drugs" has been a brutal and chaotic failure (more than 160,000 lives have been lost). The drug cartels and the forces of law and order are often in collusion, corruption is everywhere. Life is cheap and inconvenient people - the poor, the unlucky, the honest or the inquisitive - can be "disappeared" leaving not a trace behind (in September 2015, more than 26,798 were officially registered as "not located"). Yet people in all walks of life have refused to give up. Diego Enrique Osorno and Juan Villoro tell stories of teenage prostitution and Mexico's street children. Anabel Hernández and Emiliano Ruiz Parra give chilling accounts of the "disappearance" of forty-three students and the murder of a self-educated land lawyer. Sergio González Rodríguez and Marcela Turati dissect the impact of the violence on the victims and those left behind, while Lydia Cacho contributes a journal of what it is like to live every day of your life under threat of death. Reading these accounts we begin to understand the true nature of the meltdown of democracy, obscured by lurid headlines, and the sheer physical and intellectual courage needed to oppose it.

In September 19, 1985, a powerful earthquake hit Mexico City in the early morning hours. As the city collapses, the government fails to respond. Long a voice of social conscience, prominent Mexican journalist, Elena Poniatowska chronicles the disintegration of the city's physical and social structure, the widespread grassroots organizing against government corruption and incompetence, and the reliency of the human spirit. As a transformative moment in the life of Mexican society, the earthquake is as much a component of the country's current crisis as the 1982 debt crisis, the problematic economic of the last ten years, and the recent elections. In masterfully weaving together a multiplicity of voices, Poniatowska has reasserted the inherent value and latent power of people working together. Punctuated by Poniatowska's own experiences and observations, these post disaster testimonies speak of the disruption of families and neighborhoods, of the destruction of homes and hospitals, of mutilation and death the collective loss of a city.Drawing the reader dramatically into the scene of national horror through dozens of personal stories, Poniatowska demonstrates the importance of courage and self-reliance in redeeming life from chaos. Elena Poniatowska, a prominent and prolific Mexican journalist and novelist, has written twenty-five books. Several have been translated into English, including "Massacre in Mexico" about the 1968 student/worker uprising in Mexico City, and the forthcoming "Tinisima", which centers upon the life of Tina Modotti. Aurora Camacho de Schmidt is Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Swarthmore College. She has worked as a writer and as the National Representative for the Mexico-U.S. Border Program of the American Friends Service Committee. Arthur Schmidt is Associate Professor of History and former Director of the Latin American Studies Center at Temple University. He is the author of "The Social and Economic Effect of the Railroad in Puebla and Veracruz, Mexico, 1867-1911".

This includes Frida Kahlo, Maria Izquierdo, and Nahui Olin, three outstanding artists of the cultural renaissance of the early twentieth century, and Nellie Campobello, Elena Garro, Rosario Castellanos, and Pita Amor, forerunner writers and poets whose works laid a path for Mexican women writers in the later twentieth century.

This includes Frida Kahlo, Maria Izquierdo, and Nahui Olin, three outstanding artists of the cultural renaissance of the early twentieth century, and Nellie Campobello, Elena Garro, Rosario Castellanos, and Pita Amor, forerunner writers and poets whose works laid a path for Mexican women writers in the later twentieth century.