Álvaro Enrigue

Álvaro Enrigue
Enrigue at the 2016 Hay Festival
Born	(1969-08-06) August 6, 1969 Guadalajara, Mexico

Álvaro Enrigue (born 6 August 1969 in Guadalajara, Mexico) is the award winning author of four novels and two books of short stories.^[1] He has been translated into multiple languages, including German, English and French. He lives in Hamilton Heights, New York City, and is married to the writer Valeria Luiselli.^[2]

Life and work

In 1996, Enrigue was awarded the prestigious Joaquín Mortiz Prize for his first novel, La muerte de un instalador (Death of an Installation Artist). Since then it has been reprinted five times, and in 2012 it was selected as one of the key novels of the Mexican 20th century, and anthologized by Mexico's largest publishing house, Fondo de Cultura Económica. His books Vidas perpendiculares (Perpendicular Lives) and Hipotermia (Hypothermia) have also been widely acclaimed.

Álvaro Enrigue's excellent novel Vidas perpendiculares belongs to many literary traditions at once and shows a great mastery of them all ... His novel belongs to Max Planck's quantum universe rather than the relativistic universe of Albert Einstein: a world of coexisting fields in constant interaction and whose particles are created or destroyed in the same act.

— Carlos Fuentes, El País^[3]

Both novels have been published by Gallimard. Hypothermia, which offers an "unflinching gaze towards 21st-century life and the immigrant experience", was published in 2013 in the USA and England by Dalkey Archive Press in a translation by Brendan Riley.^[4] His latest novel, Decencia (Decency), has received praises in Latin America's and Spain's most relevant publications.

In 2007, he was selected as one of the most influential contemporary writers in Spanish by the Hay Festival's Bogotá39. In 2009, he was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation Residence Fellowship at the Bellagio Centre to finish the manuscript of his last novel, Decencia (Decency). In 2011 he became a fellow at the Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars of the New York Public Library, where he began working on his fifth novel.^[5]

On November 4, 2013, Enrigue's novel Muerte súbita (Sudden Death) was announced as the winner of the 31st Herralde Novel Prize, joining a distinguished list of works by authors from Spain and Latin America, including Álvaro Pombo, Enrique Vila-Matas, Antonio Ungar, Javier Marías, Juan Villoro, and Roberto Bolaño.^[6]

Selected publications

• Muerte súbita, Barcelona/Mexico City: Editorial Anagrama, 2013, ISBN 9788433934505
  • Sudden Death, Riverhead, 2016, ISBN 9781594633461
• El amigo del héroe. Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial México. 1 November 2012. ISBN 978-607-31-1402-8. 
• Decencia, Barcelona/Mexico City: Editorial Anagrama, 2011, ISBN 9788433932921
• Vidas perpendiculares, Barcelona/Mexico City: Editorial Anagrama, 2008, ISBN 9789688673645
• Hipotermia, Barcelona/Mexico City: Anagrama (2006); Hypothermia. Dalkey Archive Press. 2 May 2013. pp. 133–. ISBN 978-1-56478-969-3. 
• El cementerio de sillas, Madrid/Mexico City: Ediciones Lengua de Trapo, 2002, ISBN 9788489618985
• Virtudes capitales, Mexico City: Editorial Joaquín Mortiz, 1998, ISBN 9789682707285
• La muerte de un instalador, Mexico City: Joaquín Mortiz (1996); La muerte de un instalador. Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial México. 1 November 2012. ISBN 978-607-31-1356-4. 

References

External links

• List of relevant reviews of Álvaro Enrigue's latest novel, Decencia
• Álvaro Enrigue by Scott Esposito Bomb