Elena Poniatowska
Encyclopedia
Elena Poniatowska is a Mexican
journalist and author. Her generation of writers include Carlos Fuentes, José Emilio Pacheco
and Carlos Monsiváis
.
nobleman who was a descendant of the brother of King Stanislaus II of Poland, the last king of Poland. The Poniatowski brothers of King Stanislaus were granted Princely titles as relatives to the King. She also is descendant of King Louis XV of France
through her paternal great-grandmother Louis Le Hon. Her mother, Paula Amor de Yturbe, was a Mexican
of mixed French
ancestry, and also a descendant of Mexican nobility
.
Poniatowska fled from France with her mother during the Second World War. The family settled in Mexico City
, where the young Elena and her sister Kitzia learned Spanish from an Indian servant. In 1943, Elena was sent to study to the United States. She returned to Mexico in 1953 and started her career as a journalist working for the newspaper Excélsior
.
She is best known for her 1971 work La noche de Tlatelolco (published in English as Massacre in Mexico), in which she relates her interviews with survivors and families of those who died in the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre
in Mexico City. Since then she has published several works of fiction, testimonial literature, as well as book compilations of her interviews with writers, artists, and politicians. In recent years her prominence as a public intellectual and political figure in Mexico has increased.
Since 2005, Poniatowska has been an active supporter of Andrés Manuel López Obrador
. In April 2006 she appeared in a series of television commercials denouncing the attempts of the other two major parties, particularly the National Action Party
, to link López Obrador to leftist
President Hugo Chávez
of Venezuela
.
Her aunt was Mexican aristocrat and poet Guadalupe 'Pita' Amor
. Her sister lives abroad.
On June 2, 2011, World Literature Today
announced that Poniatowska had been nominated for the prestigious Neustadt International Prize for Literature
for 2012, her nomination being put forth by juror Norma Elia Cantú
, a Chicana writer and a professor of English at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
Spanish
Mexico
The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...
journalist and author. Her generation of writers include Carlos Fuentes, José Emilio Pacheco
José Emilio Pacheco
José Emilio Pacheco Berny is a Mexican essayist, novelist and short story writer. He is regarded as one of the major Mexican poets of the second half of the 20th century....
and Carlos Monsiváis
Carlos Monsiváis
Carlos Monsiváis Aceves was a Mexican writer, critic, political activist, and journalist. of French decent He also wrote political opinion columns in leading newspapers and was considered to be an opinion leader within the country's progressive sectors. His generation of writers includes Elena...
.
Life
Poniatowska was born in Paris to Prince Jean Joseph Evremont Sperry Poniatowski and Paula Amor Yturbe. Her father was a FrenchFrench people
The French are a nation that share a common French culture and speak the French language as a mother tongue. Historically, the French population are descended from peoples of Celtic, Latin and Germanic origin, and are today a mixture of several ethnic groups...
nobleman who was a descendant of the brother of King Stanislaus II of Poland, the last king of Poland. The Poniatowski brothers of King Stanislaus were granted Princely titles as relatives to the King. She also is descendant of King Louis XV of France
Louis XV of France
Louis XV was a Bourbon monarch who ruled as King of France and of Navarre from 1 September 1715 until his death. He succeeded his great-grandfather at the age of five, his first cousin Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, served as Regent of the kingdom until Louis's majority in 1723...
through her paternal great-grandmother Louis Le Hon. Her mother, Paula Amor de Yturbe, was a Mexican
Demographics of Mexico
With a population 112,336,538 in 2010, Mexico is the most populous Spanish-speaking country in the world, the second-most populous country in Latin America after Portuguese-speaking Brazil, and the second in North America, after the United States. Throughout most of the twentieth century Mexico's...
of mixed French
French people
The French are a nation that share a common French culture and speak the French language as a mother tongue. Historically, the French population are descended from peoples of Celtic, Latin and Germanic origin, and are today a mixture of several ethnic groups...
ancestry, and also a descendant of Mexican nobility
Mexican nobility
Mexican nobility refers to the titled nobles and untitled gentry families of Mexico. Most of the descendants of these families still live in Mexico today, but some can be found in Europe and other countries....
.
Poniatowska fled from France with her mother during the Second World War. The family settled in Mexico City
Mexico City
Mexico City is the Federal District , capital of Mexico and seat of the federal powers of the Mexican Union. It is a federal entity within Mexico which is not part of any one of the 31 Mexican states but belongs to the federation as a whole...
, where the young Elena and her sister Kitzia learned Spanish from an Indian servant. In 1943, Elena was sent to study to the United States. She returned to Mexico in 1953 and started her career as a journalist working for the newspaper Excélsior
Excélsior
Excélsior is a daily newspaper, founded by Rafael Alducin and published in Mexico City since 1917.During the 1950s and 1960s, the newspaper's editorial stance was of a relatively liberal bent, under the editorship of Julio Scherer...
.
She is best known for her 1971 work La noche de Tlatelolco (published in English as Massacre in Mexico), in which she relates her interviews with survivors and families of those who died in the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre
Tlatelolco massacre
The Tlatelolco massacre, also known as The Night of Tlatelolco , was a government massacre of student and civilian protesters and bystanders that took place during the afternoon and night of October 2, 1968, in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in the Tlatelolco section of Mexico City...
in Mexico City. Since then she has published several works of fiction, testimonial literature, as well as book compilations of her interviews with writers, artists, and politicians. In recent years her prominence as a public intellectual and political figure in Mexico has increased.
Since 2005, Poniatowska has been an active supporter of Andrés Manuel López Obrador
Andrés Manuel López Obrador
Andrés Manuel López Obrador , also known as AMLO or El Peje, is a Mexican politician who held the position of Head of Government of the Federal District from 2000 to 2005, before resigning in July 2005 to contend the 2006 presidential election, representing the unsuccessful Coalition for the Good...
. In April 2006 she appeared in a series of television commercials denouncing the attempts of the other two major parties, particularly the National Action Party
National Action Party (Mexico)
The National Action Party , is one of the three main political parties in Mexico. The party's political platform is generally considered Centre-Right in the Mexican political spectrum. Since 2000, the President of Mexico has been a member of this party; both houses have PAN pluralities, but the...
, to link López Obrador to leftist
Left-wing politics
In politics, Left, left-wing and leftist generally refer to support for social change to create a more egalitarian society...
President Hugo Chávez
Hugo Chávez
Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías is the 56th and current President of Venezuela, having held that position since 1999. He was formerly the leader of the Fifth Republic Movement political party from its foundation in 1997 until 2007, when he became the leader of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela...
of Venezuela
Venezuela
Venezuela , officially called the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela , is a tropical country on the northern coast of South America. It borders Colombia to the west, Guyana to the east, and Brazil to the south...
.
Her aunt was Mexican aristocrat and poet Guadalupe 'Pita' Amor
Pita Amor
Guadalupe Teresa Amor Schmidtlein , who wrote as Pita Amor, was a Mexican poet. She was born in Mexico City, the youngest child of a family with seven children, of mixed French, German and Spanish ancestry, a member of the Mexican aristocracy...
. Her sister lives abroad.
On June 2, 2011, World Literature Today
World Literature Today
World Literature Today is an American magazine, published bimonthly at the University of Oklahoma. It was founded in 1927 by Roy Temple House as Books Abroad. In January 1977, the journal became World Literature Today...
announced that Poniatowska had been nominated for the prestigious Neustadt International Prize for Literature
Neustadt International Prize for Literature
The Neustadt International Prize for Literature is a biennial award for literature sponsored by the University of Oklahoma and its international literary publication, World Literature Today. It is widely considered to be the most prestigious international literary prize after the Nobel Prize in...
for 2012, her nomination being put forth by juror Norma Elia Cantú
Norma Elia Cantú
Norma Elia Cantú is a Chicana postmodernist writer and a professor of English at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She was born in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, Mexico to Florentino Cantú Vargas and the former Virginia Ramón Becerra. She was reared in Laredo, Texas, the seat of Webb County, and...
, a Chicana writer and a professor of English at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
Works
- 1954 - Lilus Kikus (Collection of Short StoriesShort storyA short story is a work of fiction that is usually written in prose, often in narrative format. This format tends to be more pointed than longer works of fiction, such as novellas and novels. Short story definitions based on length differ somewhat, even among professional writers, in part because...
) - 1956 - Melés y Teleo (Short Storie, in Panoramas Magazine)
- 1961 - Palabras cruzadas (ChronicChronicChronic may refer to:* Chronic , a disease that is long-lasting and reoccurring.* Chronic toxicity, a substance with toxic effects after continuous or repeated exposure* The Chronic, a 1992 album by Dr. Dre...
) - 1963 - Todo empezó el Domingo (ChronicChronicChronic may refer to:* Chronic , a disease that is long-lasting and reoccurring.* Chronic toxicity, a substance with toxic effects after continuous or repeated exposure* The Chronic, a 1992 album by Dr. Dre...
) - 1969 - Hasta no verte, Jesus mío (NovelNovelA novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
) - 1971 - La noche de Tlatelolco, about the 1968 Tlatelolco massacreTlatelolco massacreThe Tlatelolco massacre, also known as The Night of Tlatelolco , was a government massacre of student and civilian protesters and bystanders that took place during the afternoon and night of October 2, 1968, in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in the Tlatelolco section of Mexico City...
(Historic Account) - 1978 - Querido Diego, te abraza Quiela (Collection of fictional letters from Angelina BeloffAngelina BeloffAngelina Beloff was a Russian painter and sculptor, who worked predominantly in Mexico.- Biography :Beloff originally decided to study pediatrics, but then she matriculated to St. Petersburg Academy of Arts in 1904, where she studied until 1909...
to Diego RiveraDiego RiveraDiego María de la Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez was a prominent Mexican painter born in Guanajuato, Guanajuato, an active communist, and husband of Frida Kahlo . His large wall works in fresco helped establish the Mexican Mural Movement in...
.) - 1979 - Gaby Brimmer, co-written autobiography of Mexican-born author and disability rights activist Gabriela BrimmerGabriela BrimmerGabriela "Gaby" Brimmer , a writer and activist for persons with disabilities, was born in Mexico as a daughter of Austrian Jewish immigrants. Gaby was born with cerebral palsy and since childhood learned to act in a world that has difficulty accepting diversity...
- 1980 - Fuerte es el silencio (Historic Account)
- 1982 - Domingo Siete (Chronic)
- 1982 - El último Guajolote (Chronic)
- 1985 - ¡Ay vida, no me mereces! Carlos Fuentes, Rosario Castellanos, Juan Rulfo, la literatura de la Onda México (Essay)
- 1988 - La flor de lis (Novel)
- 1988 - Nada, nadie. Las voces del temblor, about the 1985 Mexico City earthquake1985 Mexico City earthquakeThe 1985 Mexico City earthquake, a magnitude 8.0 earthquake that struck Mexico City on the early morning of 19 September 1985 at around 7:19 AM , caused the deaths of at least 10,000 people and serious damage to the greater Mexico City Area. The complete seismic event...
(Historic Account) - 1989 - De noche vienes (Collection of Short Stories)
- 1991 - Tinísima (Novel)
- 1994 - Luz y luna, las lunitas (Essay)
- 1997 - Guerrero Viejo (Photos and oral histories of the town of GuerreroGuerrero, CoahuilaGuerrero is a city and seat of the municipality of Guerrero, in the north-eastern Mexican state of Coahuila. The 2010 census population was reported as 959 inhabitants.-History:...
, flooded by damming of the Rio GrandeRio GrandeThe Rio Grande is a river that flows from southwestern Colorado in the United States to the Gulf of Mexico. Along the way it forms part of the Mexico – United States border. Its length varies as its course changes...
) ISBN 9780965526807 - 1997 - Paseo de la Reforma (Novel)
- 1998 - Octavio Paz, las palabras del árbol (Essay)
- 1999 - Las soldaderas (Photographic Archive)
- 2000 - Las mil y una... La herida de Paulina (Chronic)
- 2000 - Juan Soriano, niño de mil años (Essay)
- 2000 - Las siete cabritas (Essay)
- 2001 - Mariana Yampolsky y la buganvillia
- 2001 - La piel del cielo (Novel, Winner of the Premio Alfaguara de NovelaPremio Alfaguara de NovelaPremio Alfaguara de Novela is a Spanish-language literary award. The award is one of the most prestigious in the Spanish language. It includes a prize of $175,000 making it one of the richest literary prizes in the world. It is sponsored by Alfaguara, a publisher.The prize was created in 1965 by...
2001) - 2003 - Tlapalería (Collection of Short Stories)
- 2005 - Obras reunidas (Complete Works)
- 2006 - El tren pasa pimero (Novel, Winner of the Rómulo Gallegos PrizeRómulo Gallegos PrizeThe Rómulo Gallegos International Novel Prize was created on 6 August 1964 by a presidential decree enacted by Venezuelan President Raúl Leoni, in honor of the Venezuelan politician and President Rómulo Gallegos, the author of Doña Bárbara....
) - 2006 - La Adelita (Infant Book)
- 2007 - Amanecer en el Zócalo. Los 50 días que confrontaron a México (Historic Account)
- 2008 - El burro que metió la pata (Infant Book)
- 2008 - Rondas de la niña mala (Poetry, Songs)
- 2008 - Jardín de Francia (Interviews)
- 2008 - Boda en Chimalistac (Infant Book)
- 2009 - No den las gracias. La colonia Rubén Jaramillo y el Güero Medrano (Chronic)
- 2009 - La vendedora de nubes (Infant Book)
- 2011 - Leonora (Historical novel on the surrealist painter Leonora CarringtonLeonora CarringtonLeonora Carrington OBE was a British-born Mexican artist, a surrealist painter and a novelist. She lived most of her life in Mexico City.-Early life:...
) Seix Barral Biblioteca Breve Prize
Awards
- Premio Xavier Villaurrutia (declined, 1971)
- Premio Nacional de Periodismo (1979)
- Premio Alfaguara de Novela (2001)
- Ordre national de la Légion d'honneurLégion d'honneurThe Legion of Honour, or in full the National Order of the Legion of Honour is a French order established by Napoleon Bonaparte, First Consul of the Consulat which succeeded to the First Republic, on 19 May 1802...
(2004) - Lifetime Achievement Award, International Women's Media Foundation (2006)
- Rómulo Gallegos PrizeRómulo Gallegos PrizeThe Rómulo Gallegos International Novel Prize was created on 6 August 1964 by a presidential decree enacted by Venezuelan President Raúl Leoni, in honor of the Venezuelan politician and President Rómulo Gallegos, the author of Doña Bárbara....
(2007) - Premio Biblioteca Breve (2011)
Ancestry
Further reading
English- The writing of Elena Poniatowska : engaging dialogues / Beth Ellen Jorgensen., 1994
- Elena Poniatowska : an intimate biography / Michael Karl Schuessler., 2007
- Reading the feminine voice in Latin American women's fiction : from Teresa de la Parra to Elena Poniatowska and Luisa Valenzuela / María Teresa Medeiros-Lichem., 2002
- Through their eyes : marginality in the works of Elena Poniatowska, Silvia Molina and Rosa Nissán / Nathanial Eli Gardner., 2007
Spanish
- Elenísima : ingenio y figura de Elena Poniatowska / Michael Karl Schuessler., 2003
- Catálogo de ángeles mexicanos : Elena Poniatowska / Carmen Perilli., 2006
- Me lo dijo Elena Poniatowska : su vida, obra y pasiones / Esteban Ascencio., 1997
- Elena Poniatowska / Margarita García Flores., 1983