Mexican Writer Poniatowska Wins Cervantes Prize Hector Tobar - The Los Angeles Times
go to original April 24, 2014

Author Elena Poniatowska, pictured here in March, will be awarded the Cervantes Prize, the most prestigious literary prize in the Spanish language, this week. (Rebecca Blackwell/AP)

The author and journalist Elena Poniatowska, who gained fame in Mexico for her chronicles of social injustice and government repression, is this year’s winner of the Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the most prestigious literary prize in the Spanish language.

Poniatowska, 82, has penned more than three dozen books, including several novels, children’s books, essay collections, and works of nonfiction, including “La Noche de Tlatelolco,” (“The Night of Tlatelolco”) a groundbreaking oral history of the 1968 army massacre of student protesters in Mexico City. She'll receive the prize Wednesday in a ceremony in Madrid.

“This is an opening for many women, because there are many more women who deserved this more than I did,” Poniatowska said in a Mexico City news conference before leaving for Madrid. She’s only the fourth woman to win the Cervantes in its 39-year history.

The daughter of French-Polish immigrants to Mexico, Poniatowska began her career writing for the newspaper Excelsior. In an interview with the Madrid newspaper El Pais this week, she recounted how the painter Diego Rivera called her the “little Polish girl who asks too many questions,” ("polaquita preguntona").

“I will always be that way, I was always asking too many questions and I’ll be that way until I die,” she said.

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