Biblioasis International Translation Series – serie

"Books written out of great emotional distress are ... rarely great literature. Thomas Melle's [The World at My Back] is great literature because he pulls it off without a single false note."—Deutschlandfunk (German National Radio)Longlisted for the 2024 National Translation Award in Prose • A Finalist for the German Book Prize • Translated into Eighteen LanguagesAddicted to culture, author Thomas Melle has built up an impressive personal library. His heart is in these books, and he loves to feel them at his back, their promise and challenge, as he writes. But in the middle of a violent dissociative episode, when they become ballast to his increasingly manic self, he disperses almost overnight what had taken decades to gather. Nor is this all he loses: descending further into an incomprehensible madness, he loses friendships and his career as a novelist and celebrated playwright, but the most savage cruelty is that he no longer either knows or understands himself.Vulnerable and claustrophobic, shattering and profoundly moving, Thomas Melle’s The World at My Back is a book dedicated to the impossibility of reclaiming what has been lost, its lines both a prayer and reminder that, on the other side of madness, other possibilities await.

Shortlisted for the 2016 Giller PrizeSelected for Indies Introduce Summer/Fall 2016Catherine Leroux's first novel, translated into English brilliantly by Lazer Lederhendler, ties together stories about siblings joined in surprising ways. A woman learns that she absorbed her twin sister's body in the womb and that she has two sets of DNA; a girl in the deep South pushes her sister out of the way of a speeding train, losing her legs; and a political couple learn that they are non-identical twins separated at birth. The Party Wall establishes Leroux as one of North America's most intelligent and innovative young authors.Catherine Leroux was born in 1979 in Montreal, Quebec, where she continues to live and write.

In the rough hill country of rural Catalonia, the Spanish Civil War is over and the villagers live under occupation by the fascist Civil Guard. With his father in jail, facing possible execution as a subversive, and his mother working long hours in a factory, eleven-year-old Andreu is sent to live with his grandmother, uncles, aunts and cousins in a farmhouse in a remote valley. His inquisitive, self-taught grandmother encourages him to study, but who will Andreu become? He doesn't want to be a farmhand, or work in a factory, or flee into exile in France like his uncle and aunt. His cousin Nuria invites him to play sex games with her in the woods, but Andreu cannot stop thinking about a young man he sees lying naked in a monastery garden. Confronted on all sides by the need to define himself, Andreu must make a difficult decision.One of the major novels of contemporary Spain, and the inspiration for the first film in the Catalan language to be nominated by Spain for an Academy Award, Black Bread brings to life a rural world of mythical force as it traces with piercing psychological insight, in gorgeous prose, the movements of a boy's psyche as he contemplates growing into an adult. Born in 1933, Emili Teixidor's first novel, Retrato de un asesino de pajaros, was published to tremendous acclaim in 1988, followed by several more which established him as one of Spain's greatest contemporary authors. Teixidor died in 2012.

In the rough hill country of rural Catalonia, the Spanish Civil War is over and the villagers live under occupation by the fascist Civil Guard. With his father in jail, facing possible execution as a subversive, and his mother working long hours in a factory, eleven-year-old Andreu is sent to live with his grandmother, uncles, aunts and cousins in a farmhouse in a remote valley. His inquisitive, self-taught grandmother encourages him to study, but who will Andreu become? He doesn't want to be a farmhand, or work in a factory, or flee into exile in France like his uncle and aunt. His cousin Núria invites him to play sex games with her in the woods, but Andreu cannot stop thinking about a young man he sees lying naked in a monastery garden.Confronted on all sides by the need to define himself, Andreu must make a difficult decision. One of the major novels of contemporary Spain, and the inspiration for the first film in the Catalan language to be nominated by Spain for an Academy Award, Black Bread brings to life a rural world of mythical force as it traces with piercing psychological insight, in gorgeous prose, the movements of a boy's psyche as he contemplates growing into an adult.Born in 1933, Emili Teixidor's first novel, Retrato de un asesino de pájaros, was published to tremendous acclaim in 1988, followed by several more which established him as one of Spain's greatest contemporary authors. Teixidor died in 2012.

NOMINATED FOR THE 2019 BEST TRANSLATED BOOK AWARD A VANITY FAIR HOT TYPE BOOK FOR APRIL 2018 A VULTURE MUST-READ TRANSLATED BOOK FROM THE PAST 5 YEARS A GLOBE AND MAIL BEST BOOK OF 2018 A LIT HUB FAVOURITE BOOK OF THE YEAR A WORLD LITERATURE TODAY NOTABLE TRANSLATION OF 2018In a crumbling apartment block in the Angolan city of Luanda, families work, laugh, scheme, and get by. In the middle of it all is the melancholic Odonato, nostalgic for the country of his youth and searching for his lost son. As his hope drains away and as the city outside his doors changes beyond all recognition, Odonato’s flesh becomes transparent and his body increasingly weightless. A captivating blend of magical realism, scathing political satire, tender comedy, and literary experimentation, Transparent City offers a gripping and joyful portrait of urban Africa quite unlike any before yet published in English, and places Ondjaki, indisputably, among the continent’s most accomplished writers.

Winner of the 2020 Governor General's Award in TranslationA World Literature Today Notable Translation of 2020Sliding doors open and close automatically, exit to the left, entrance to the right. Beyond it, cars go by, and pedestrians and cyclists. A large park behaves as if nothing has happened. The mirage of a world intact. In an instant, a life changes forever. After he falls from a scaffold on the construction site where he works, the comatose David is visited daily by his wife, Caroline, and their six-year-old son Bertrand—but despite their devoted efforts, there’s no crossing the ineffable divide between consciousness and the mysterious world David now inhabits. A moving story of love and mourning, elegantly translated by Lazer Lederhendler, If You Hear Me asks what it means to be alive and how we learn to accept the unacceptable.

A NEW YORK TIMES NEW & NOTEWORTHY BOOKGood bookshops are questions without answers. They are places that provoke you intellectually, encode riddles, surprise and offer challenges … A pleasing labyrinth where you can’t get lost: that comes later, at home, when you immerse yourself in the books you have bought; lose yourself in new questions, knowing you will find answers.Picking up where the widely praised Bookshops: A Reader’s History left off, Against Amazon and Other Essays explores the increasing pressures of Amazon and other new technologies on bookshops and libraries. In essays on these vital social, cultural, and intellectual spaces, Jorge Carrión travels from London to Geneva, from Miami’s Little Havana to Argentina, from his own well-loved childhood library to the rosewood shelves of Jules Verne’s Nautilus and the innovative spaces that characterize South Korea’s bookshop renaissance. Including interviews with writers and librarians—including Alberto Manguel, Iain Sinclair, Luigi Amara, and Han Kang, among others—Against Amazon is equal parts a celebration of books and bookshops, an autobiography of a reader, a travelogue, a love letter—and, most urgently, a manifesto against the corrosive influence of late capitalism.

Faldistoire’s grandfather thinks he’s a ghost. Sylvie’s mother reads tarot and summons stormclouds to mete her witch’s justice. Behind his Dad of the Year demeanour, Sébastien’s father hides dark designs. It’s Croustine’s grandfather who makes the boy a pair of slippers from the dead family dog, but it’s his father, the cannily-named Kevin Lambert, who always seems to be nearby when tragedy strikes, and in the cemetery, under the baleful eyes of toads, small graves are dug one after the other: Chicoutimi, Quebec, is a dangerous place for children. But these young victims of rape, arbitrary violence, and senseless murder keep coming back from the dead. They return to school, explore their sexualities, keep tabs on grown-up sins—and plot their apocalyptic retribution. Surreal and darkly comic, this debut novel by Kevin Lambert, one of the most celebrated and controversial writers to come out of Quebec in recent memory, takes the adult world to task—and then takes revenge.

Winner of the 2023 French-American Translation Prize for FictionNot far away from here is a lake. You have to pay for access to its shores, but I know where there’s a hole in the fence. The water will be icy, but it will still be in a liquid state. That’s what I will do today. I will go through the hole in the fence and I’ll dive into the icy water. And then I’ll go home.Friends since grade school, Céline, Julie, and Sabrina come of age at the start of a new millennium, supporting each other and drifting apart as their lives pull them in different directions. But when their friend dies by suicide in the abandoned city lot where they once gathered, they must carry on in the world that left him behind—one they once dreamed they would change for the better. From the grind of Montreal service jobs, to isolated French Ontario countryside childhoods, to the tenuous cooperation of Bay Area punk squats, the three young women navigate everyday losses and fears against the backdrop of a tumultuous twenty-first century. An ode to friendship and the ties that bind us together, Stéfanie Clermont’s award-winning The Music Game confronts the violence of the modern world and pays homage to those who work in the hope and faith that it can still be made a better place.

An NPR Best Book of 2021New and selected fiction, over half in English for the first time, from the winner of the 2014 Neustadt Prize.Known internationally for his novels, Neustadt Prize-winner Mia Couto first became famous for his short stories. Sea Loves Me includes sixty-four of his best, thirty-six of which appear in English for the first time. Covering the entire arc of Couto's career, this collection displays the Mozambican author's inventiveness, sensitivity, and social range with greater richness than any previous collection—from early stories that reflect the harshness of life under Portuguese colonialism; to magical tales of rural Africa; to contemporary fables of the fluidity of race and gender, environmental disaster, and the clash between the countryside and the city. The title novella, long acclaimed as one of Couto's best works but never before available in English, caps this collection with the lyrical story of a search for a lost father that leads unexpectedly to love.

A Crime Reads Best International Crime Fiction of 2023 • One of Crime Reads most anticipated LatinX Horror and Crime Fiction of 2023This sumptuously written thriller asks probing questions about how we live with each other and with our planet.Raised on his wits on the streets of Central America, the Cobra, a young debt collector and gang enforcer, has never had the chance to discern between right and wrong, until he’s assigned the murder of Polo, a prominent human rights activist—and his friend. When his conscience gives him pause and his patrón catches on, a remote Mayan community offers the Cobra a potential refuge, but the people there are up against predatory mining companies. With danger encroaching, the Cobra is forced to confront his violent past and make a decision about what he’s willing to risk in the future, and who it will be for.Following the Cobra, Polo, a faction of drug-dealing oligarchs, and Jacobo, a child caught in the crosshairs, Rey Rosa maps an extensive web of corruption upheld by decades of political oppression. A scathing indictment of exploitation in all its forms, The Country of Toó is a gripping account of what it means to consider societal change under the constant threat of violence.

Winner of the 2025 French-American Translation Prize in Fiction • Finalist for the 2024 Governor General's Literary Award in Translation • Finalist for the 2025 Cole Foundation Prize for Translation • A Globe and Mail Most Anticipated Spring TitleDon Quixote meets Who Framed Roger Rabbit in this slapstick epic about destiny, family demons, and revenge.1911. A hockey game in Quebec's Gaspé Peninsula. With the score tied two-two in overtime, local tough guy Billy Joe Pictou fires the puck directly into Monti Bouge's mouth. When Pictou's momentum carries them both across the goal line in a spray of shattered teeth, Victor Bradley, erstwhile referee and local mailman, rules that the goal counts—and Monti's ensuing revenge for this injustice sprawls across three generations, one hundred years, and dozens of dastardly deeds. Fuelled by a bottomless supply of Yukon, the high-proof hooch that may or may not cause the hallucinatory sightings of a technicolor beast that haunts not just Monti but his descendants, it's up to Monti's grandson François—and his floundering doctoral dissertation—to make sense of the vendetta that's shaped the destiny of their town and everyone in it. Brilliantly translated into slapstick English by Lazer Lederhendler, The Hollow Beast introduces Christophe Bernard as a master of epic comedy.

Winner of Canada Reads 2024 • Longlisted for the 2025 Dublin Literary Award • Longlisted for the 2024 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction • One of Tor.com's Can't Miss Speculative Fiction for Fall 2023 • Listed in CBC Books Fiction to Read in Fall 2023 • One of Kirkus Reviews' Fall 2023 Big Books By Small Presses • A Kirkus Review Work of Translated Fiction To Read Now • One of CBC Books Best Books of 2023 • A CBC Books Bestselling Canadian Book of the WeekIn an alternate history in which the French never surrendered Detroit, children protect their own kingdom in the trees.In an alternate history of Detroit, the Motor City was never surrendered to the US. Its residents deal with pollution, poverty, and the legacy of racism—and strange and magical things are happening: children rule over their own kingdom in the trees and burned houses regenerate themselves. When Gloria arrives looking for answers and her missing granddaughters, at first she finds only a hungry mouse in the derelict home where her daughter was murdered. But the neighbours take pity on her and she turns to their resilience and impressive gardens for sustenance.When a strange intuition sends Gloria into the woods of Parc Rouge, where the city’s orphaned and abandoned children are rumored to have created their own society, she can’t imagine the strength she will find. A richly imagined story of community and a plea for persistence in the face of our uncertain future, The Future is a lyrical testament to the power we hold to protect the people and places we love—together.

A seminal novel of African decolonization available for the first time in English translation. Lisbon 1961. Aware that the secret police are watching them, four young Angolans discuss their plans for a utopian homeland free from Portuguese rule. When war breaks out, they flee to France and must decide whether they will return home to join the fight. Two remain in exile and two return to Angola to become guerilla fighters, barely escaping capture over the course of the brutal fourteen-year war. Reunited in the capital of Luanda, the old friends face independence with their confidence shaken and struggle to build a new society free of the corruption and violence of colonial rule.Pepetela, a former revolutionary guerilla fighter and Angolan government minister, is the author of more than twenty novels that have won prizes in Africa, Europe, and South America. The Utopian Generation is widely considered in the Portuguese-speaking world an essential novel of African decolonization—and is now available in English translation for the first time.

Shortlisted for the 2026 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction • Finalist for the 2025 Governor General's Literary Award in Translation • Finalist for the 2025 John Glassco Translation Prize • Finalist for the 2026 French American Foundation Translation Prize • A Globe 100 Best Book of 2025 • Longlisted for the 2025 Warland Award • A CBC Books Best Canadian Nonfiction Book of 2025 • A Quill & Quire Notable Book of 2025An unlikely literary friendship from the past sheds light on the radicalization of public debate around identity, race, and censorship.In 1961, James Baldwin spent several months in William Styron’s guest house. The two wrote during the day, then spent evenings confiding in each other and talking about race in America. During one of those conversations, Baldwin is said to have convinced his friend to write, in first person, the story of the 1831 slave rebellion led by Nat Turner. The Confessions of Nat Turner was published to critical acclaim, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1968, and also creating outrage in part of the African American community.Decades later, the controversy around cultural appropriation, identity, and the rights and responsibilities of the writer still resonates. In Baldwin, Styron, and Me, Mélikah Abdelmoumen considers the writers' surprising yet vital friendship from her standpoint as a racialized woman torn by the often unidimensional versions of her identity put forth by today’s politics and media. Considering questions of identity, race, equity, and the often contentious public debates about these topics, Abdelmoumen works to create a space where the answers are found by first learning how to listen—even in disagreement.

Bringing together for the first time in English a selection of poems from his two previously published collections, Kapuscinski offers up a thoughtful, philosophical verse, often aphoristic in tone and structure, that is engaged politically, morally, and viscerally with the world around him. Translated from the Polish.

In the 144 poems of For as Far as the Eye Can See, Robert Melancon re-imagines the sonnet as a "rectangle of twelve lines," and poetry as "a monument as fragile as the grass." Impressionistic, seasonal, allusive, in language sharp and clean, this form-driven collection is both a book of hours and a measured meditation on art, nature, and the vagaries of perception. Robert Melancon is one of Quebec's most revered contemporary poets and a two-time winner of the Governor General's Award. A longtime translator of Canadian poet A.M. Klein, Melancon has been the poetry columnist for Le Devoir and the Radio-Canada program En Toutes Lettres; he is also a critic and has been a professor at the University of Montreal. In addition to the Governor General's Award he is a past recipient of the Prix Victor-Barbeau and the Prix Alain-Grandbois.

BY THE FINALIST FOR THE 2015 MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE THE WINNER OF THE 2014 NEUSTADT PRIZE AND THE WINNER OF THE 2013 CAMOES PRIZE "One of the greatest living writers in the Portuguese language."--Philip Graham, The Millions "Subtle and elegant."--The Wall Street Journal "At once deadpan and beguiling."--The Times Literary Supplement "To understand what makes Antonio 'Mia' Emilio Leite Couto special--even extraordinary--we have to loosen our grip on the binary that distinguishes between 'the West' and 'Africa.' Couto is 'white' without not being African, and as an 'African' writer he's one of the most important figures in a global Lusophone literature that stretches across three continents."--The New Inquiry What would Barack Obama's 2004 campaign have looked like if it unfolded in an African nation? What does it mean to be an African writer today? How do writers and poets from all continents teach us to cross the sertao, the savannah, the barren places where we're forced to walk within ourselves?Bringing together the best pieces from his previously untranslated nonfiction collections, alongside new material presented here for the first time in any language, Pensativities offers English readers a taste of Mia Couto as essayist, lecturer, and journalist--with essays on cosmopolitanism, poverty, culture gaps, conservation, and more.

Telephone wires, dark as a line in a schoolboy's notebook against the dawn; paint flakes from houses drifting down like dust; the hulking shadow of a desk that emerges, stock-still as a cow, in the moment of waking. Join poet Robert Melancon for a quiet celebration of his city, its inhabitants, and the language that gives it life. From "Eden": You go forth drunk on the multitudes, drunk on everything, while the lampposts sprinkle nodding streets with stars. Robert Melancon, former poetry columnist for Le Devoir is a recipient of the Governor General's Award, the Prix Victor-Barbeau, and the Prix Alain-Grandbois.

Shortlisted for the 2016 Giller Prize Selected for Indies Introduce Summer/Fall 2016 Catherine Leroux's first novel, translated into English brilliantly by Lazer Lederhendler, ties together stories about siblings joined in surprising ways. A woman learns that she absorbed her twin sister's body in the womb and that she has two sets of DNA; a girl in the deep South pushes her sister out of the way of a speeding train, losing her legs; and a political couple learn that they are non-identical twins separated at birth. The Party Wall establishes Leroux as one of North America's most intelligent and innovative young authors. Catherine Leroux was born in 1979 in Montreal, Quebec, where she continues to live and write.

In Montreal, Alfredo struggles with his memories of being ordered to commit an atrocity by the Bolivian army. Despising his nation as an oppressive sham, he falls for a woman who has no nation—a Kurdish freedom fighter trying to blast an independent Kurdistan into existence. As the net of intrigue closes in on his lover, Alfredo must finally face his past. Refusing to be bound by style, genre, or language, Alejandro Saravia captures the tumultuous existence of the exile.Alejandro Saravia is a Canadian-Bolivian author and journalist who lives in Montreal.María José Giménez is a translator and poet from Venezuela.

Brad succumbs to the white plague, Oscar too spends his days fighting disease, confined to a hospital. Playing the organ at night for a mysterious sickly girl, he discovers his own talent, although years after recovery, he finds himself desperate, poor, and depressed—until the devil, otherwise known to the world as impresario Norman G, happens on him in a moment of crisis.Inspired by the life of legendary jazz pianist Oscar Peterson, Mauricio Segura's Oscar evokes periods across time, from the Depression-era Montreal neighbourhood of Little Burgundy to the swinging cabarets of the 1950s, while offering a reflection on the bonds between an artist and the Caribbean diaspora from which he comes. But above all, Oscar is a poignant homage to a musical giant, a man who changed the face of jazz forever.

WINNER OF THE AMAZON CANADA FIRST NOVEL AWARD • NOMINATED FOR CANADA READS • A NEW YORK TIMES NEW & NOTEWORTHY BOOK • A NOW MAGAZINE BEST BOOK TO READ FOR SUMMER 2019 • As heard on CBC's The Sunday Edition with Michael Enright It’s October in Montreal, 2002, and winter is coming on fast. Past due on his first freelance gig and ensnared in lies to his family and friends, a graphic design student with a gambling addiction goes after the first job that promises a paycheck: dishwasher at the sophisticated La Trattoria. Though he feels out of place in the posh dining room, warned by the manager not to enter through the front and coolly assessed by the waitstaff in their tailored shirts, nothing could have prepared him for the tension and noise of the kitchen, or the dishpit’s clamor and steam. Thrust on his first night into a roiling cast of characters all moving with the whirlwind speed of the evening rush, it’s not long before he finds himself in over his head once again. A vivid, magnificent debut, with a soundtrack by Iron Maiden, The Dishwasher plunges us into a world in which everyone depends on each other—for better and for worse.

AN OPENCANADA SUMMER READ 2019In the south of Bosnia and Herzegovina lies Mostar, a medieval town on the banks of the emerald Neretva, which flows from the “valley of sugared trees” through sunny hills to reach the Adriatic Sea. This idyllic locale is the scene of Maya Ombasic’s childhood—until civil war breaks out in Yugoslavia and the bombs begin to fall. Her family is exiled to Switzerland, and after a brief return, they leave again for Canada. While Maya adapts to their new home, her father never does, refusing even to learn the language of his new country.A portmanteau of Mostar and nostalgia, Mostarghia evokes Ombasic’s yearning for a place that no longer exists: the city before the civil war, when its many ethnicities interacted in a spirit of civility and in harmony. It refers as well to Andrei Tarkovsky’s classic film Nostalghia, the viewing of which illuminated the author’s often explosive relationship with her father, a larger-than-life figure who was both influence and psychological burden: he inspired her interest, and eventual career, in philosophy, and she was his translator, his support, his obsession. Along with this portrait of a man described by turns as passionate, endearing, maddening, and suffocating, Ombasic deftly constructs a moving personal account of what it means to be a refugee and how a generation learns to thrive despite the struggles of its predecessors.

In a nameless Hungarian town, teenagers on a competitive swim team occupy their after-training hours with hard drinking and fast cars, hash cigarettes and marathons of Grand Theft Auto, the meaningless sex and late-night exploits of a world defined by self-gratification and all its attendant recklessness. Invisible to their parents and subject to the whims of an abusive coach, the crucible of competition pushes them again and again into dangerous choices. When a deadly accident leaves them second-guessing one another, they’re driven even deeper into violence. Brilliantly translated into breakneck English by Ildikó Noémi Nagy, Dead Heat is a blistering debut and an unforgettable story about young men coming of age in an abandoned generation.

A critical and commercial success in German, Kahn & Engelmann tells the story of a Jewish family from rural Hungary, their immigration to Vienna in the great days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, their loves, business ventures and failings, and their eventual tragic destruction. Narrated by Peter Engelmann, who wishes only to forget his past, this highly original novel recreates a vanished Vienna with salty humour and humanity. In a voice which is appealing without being sentimental, Peter describes his escape from the Nazis through snowy woods, his attempts to start a new life in England and Canada, and his decision to immigrate to Israel. Written by an eminent scholar, himself a survivor of Nazism, Kahn & Engelmann is both an entertaining novel and a major work of Holocaust literature.

In the Cote-des-Neiges region of Montreal, the first stop for many new immigrants, live people of more than 100 nationalities. Two recent arrivals, Marcelo, the sensitive son of Chilean refugees, and Cleo, a shy boy from Haiti, must choose as adults whether to be united by childhood friendship, or divided by race. A seminal statement about multicultural societies. Translated from the French.

In the tradition of Sandor Marai, Mihail Sebastian is a captivating Central European storyteller from the first half of the twentieth century whose work is being rediscovered by new generations of readers throughout Europe, Latin America, and the United States. The 2000 publication of his Journal 1935-1944: The Fascist Years introduced his writing to an English-speaking audience for the first time, garnering universal acclaim. Philip Roth wrote that Sebastian's Journal "deserves to be on the same shelf as Anne Frank's Diary and to find as huge a readership." Outside of the English-speaking world, Sebastian's reputation rests on his fiction. This publication of The Accident marks the first appearance of the author's fiction in English. A love story set in the Bucharest art world of the 1930s and the Transylvanian mountains, it is a deeply romantic, enthralling tale of two people who meet by chance. Along snowy ski trails and among a mysterious family in a mountain cabin, Paul and Nora, united by an attraction that contains elements of repulsion, find the keys to their fate.Mihail Sebastian (1907-1945) was born in southeastern Romania and worked in Bucharest as a lawyer, journalist, novelist, and playwright until anti-Semitic legislation forced him to abandon his public career. His long-lost diary, Journal 1935-1944: The Fascist Years, was published in seven countries between 1996 and 2007, launching an international revival of his work. Sebastian's novels and plays are available in translation throughout Europe, and also have been published in Chinese, Hindi, Bengali, and Hebrew.

"Love is the finest," writes Jaime Sabines, "the most shuddering, / the most unendurable, silence." Available for the first time as a complete selection in English, Love Poems presents Jaime Sabines' powerful erotic verse in an exceptional translation by Irish Canadian poet Colin Carberry. Jaime Sabines, Mexico's most influential modern poet, was born in Chiapas in 1926. He received numerous literary awards and honors over the course of his career. Sabines died in Mexico City in 1999.