Laura Esquivel

Born

1950-09-30

Birthplace

Mexico City, Mexico

Biography

Mexican writer and politician. She is internationally known for her work "Como agua para chocolate" published in 1989, translated into more than 30 languages. From 2008 to 2011 she held the position of General Director of Culture in Coyoacán, Mexico City. From 2015 to 2018, she was a federal Representative for the Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional (Morena), the party created by former presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a party she represented in the commissions of Science and Technology, Culture and Cinematography, and Environment and Natural Resources. She studied Theater and Dramatic Creation at the Centro de Arte Dramático A.C. (CADAC), specializing in Theater and Dramatic Creation. (CADAC) specializing in Children's Theater. She is a graduate in Preschool Education (1966-1968), instructor of the Children's Theater and Literature Workshop (1977), instructor of the Tlaxcala and Oaxaca Script Consultant Workshop (1998 - 2002) and Instructor of the Writing Laboratory Workshop in Oaxaca, Michoacán and Spain (1999). Between 1970 and 1980 she wrote children's programs for Mexican television, and in 1983, she founded the Centro de Invención Permanente, made up of artistic workshops for children, and assumed its technical direction. Her television work gave her the stimulus to devote herself to writing screenplays for film. It was then that she decided to write her first novel. "Como agua para chocolate" (Like water for chocolate) was a great commercial success. The film version would be directed by Alfonso Arau Quirós, to whom she was married from 1975 to 1995. In this novel, she uses magical realism, proclaims the importance of the kitchen as the most important part of the home, and promotes personal and family changes as a form of inner revolution. In 1994 she was awarded the ABBY Award (American Booksellers Book of the Year), the first time this award was given to a foreign writer. In 2004 she received the Giussepe Acerbi Award from the University of Verona, Italy, for her novel Tan veloz como el deseo (As Fast as Desire). In 2008 she won the prize for the best audiobook in Spanish awarded by the Audio Publishers Association (APA), for Malinche, published in 2006, which includes a codex (illustrated by Jordi Castells). In September 2011, in an interview on the occasion of his participation in the National Festival of the Arts in Argentina, he revealed that he set out to write the story of Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum. In 2014 she published A Lupita le gustaba planchar, which marks her first foray into crime novels and whose protagonist is an alcoholic policewoman, survivor of the death of her son and the abandonment of her husband who, throughout the story, becomes an anti-heroine, as she unravels the murder of her boss, the delegado (political boss) of Iztapalapa. In May 2016 she published El diario de Tita, the sequel to Como agua para chocolate. Her latest work is the novel Mi negro pasado, published in November 2017, with which she completed the trilogy Como agua para chocolate.