Mexican poet Jose Emilio Pacheco dies at age 74
MEXICO CITY — Jose Emilio Pacheco, widely regarded as one of Mexico’s foremost poets and short story writers, died Sunday at age 74, the country’s National Council for Culture and the Arts announced on its official Twitter account.
The poet, novelist, journalist, essayist, and literary critic came to be seen as a leading representative of the generation of Mexican writers that came of age in the late 1950s and 1960s.
He was best known for bittersweet accounts of adolescents growing up in a less crowded, but corrupt and unjust Mexico of the 1940s and ’50s.
He was particularly noted for the 1981 novel ‘‘Las Batallas en el Desierto,’’ or ‘‘Battles in the Desert,’’ a story of a boy’s infatuation with the mother of a classmate.
Mr. Pacheco began publishing his writing as a teenager, and in 1957 began publishing the literary magazine Estaciones with fellow university students Carlos Monsivais and Sergio Pitol, according to an official biography published when he won the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world’s highest literary honor.
His first collection of stories was published in 1958. He followed with a series of poems and story collections in the 1960s, and became editor of Culture, one of most important literary publications in Mexico during the 1960s, and published a widely praised series of prose and poetry over the next decades.
In 2009, Mr. Pacheco won the Cervantes. He was also awarded nearly two dozen other literary prizes from governments and cultural institutions in Mexico and a host of other Spanish-speaking countries.
Mr. Pacheco also taught literature at universities in the United States, Britain, and Canada and translated works by Samuel Beckett, Tennessee Williams, and T.S. Eliot.
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