Mexican writer Margo Glantz wins the Carlos Fuentes Prize for literature

The Mexican writer Margo Glantz, 92, has been awarded this Friday with the Carlos Fuentes International Prize, one of the most important in Ibero-American literature.

She is an essayist, literary and academic critic, she was not called a writer until she was 47 years old.

“Because she had not written fiction”, she told her in an interview with this newspaper.

The prize announced this Friday joins a list of recognitions that include the 2010 Fine Arts Medal, the 2004 National Prize for Arts and Sciences, and the 1994 Xavier Villaurrutia.

The Ministry of Culture, which awards the prize together with the National Autonomous University of Mexico, has highlighted the "essential and lucid work" of Glantz, which includes novels, such as

where he narrates the adventures of his family, who arrived in Mexico fleeing Nazism from the Ukraine;

dozens of essays in which she deals with topics such as the body or the work of the baroque poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and literary criticism texts.

The head of the secretariat, Alejandra Frausto, has also celebrated Glantz's "universal gaze, young voice, absolute sensitivity, total creator".

The author was born in Mexico in 1930 by chance: the ship in which her parents had left Europe ended up there because it was cheaper than reaching Cuba, as they had planned.

She was educated as a secular Jew and studied English Literature at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where she is now an emeritus professor.

She has been a visiting professor at universities such as Yale, Princeton and Harvard, and has been a member of the Mexican Academy of Language since 1995.

Sharp, loquacious, combative, and tweeting, Glantz has written about what obsesses her.

The body, for example.

In 2021, she published an anthology of her essays,

, in which she delves into vast themes with an obsessive gaze at details: a foot, a hand, a tongue.

She has also written hundreds of lines about Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the Mexican poet she has studied for more than six decades.

“I have great admiration for him.

Only one of her verses is eternal knowledge.

She reveals contemporary reality,” she told EL PAÍS in an interview.

Until the age of 47, however, he did not publish fiction.

"I tried before," she said, "but they told me my texts were like a string of loose beads."

So, she decided to self-publish the book.

Later, more fiction titles followed, such as

,

or

—Glantz likes fashion and, especially, shoes—.

The Carlos Fuentes Prize is awarded annually to artists who, through their work as a whole —written in Spanish— have enriched the literary heritage of humanity.

In 2021, the distinction was awarded to the Chilean writer Diamela Eltit.

Other writers who have received it since it was created in 2012 are the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, the Nicaraguan Sergio Ramírez or the Argentine Luisa Valenzuela.

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