Alberto Ruy Sánchez
Encyclopedia
Alberto Ruy Sánchez Lacy is a Mexican
writer
and editor
born in Mexico City
on 7 December 1951. He is an author of fiction
, non-fiction
and poetry
. Since 1988 he has been the chief editor and founding publisher of Latin America’s leading arts magazine: Artes de Mexico. He has been visiting professor
at several universities, including Stanford, Middlebury
and La Sorbonne, and has been invited to give lectures in Europe, Africa, Asia and all the American Continent. His work has been praised by Octavio Paz
, Juan Rulfo
, Severo Sarduy
, Alberto Manguel
, Claude Michel Cluny and received awards from several international institutions.
, as well as his mother, María Antonieta Lacy. Alberto Ruy Sánchez was the first of five children. Following the hazardous working engagements of his father, the family used to live almost half of the year in Mexico City and the other half in the North of the country. Including longer residence periods in Ciudad Obregón, Sonora, and Villa Constitución
, in the sonoran desert of Baja California
, where he lived when he was between three and five years old. That gave him a unique and early experience of the desert.
for the first time. From that involuntary act of memory he built a special creative relationship to the Moroccan desert, and mainly to the walled city of Essaouira
, the ancient Mogador, as main scenario for most of his novels. As he explains in his essay, The nine gifts that Morocco gave me, "My first trip to Mogador became a much longer and deeper journey. First came the shock of discovering a place that on spite of being so distant from Mexico provoked a strong impression of recognition, much greater than the one a Mexican receives upon arriving to Spain. A combination of body language, place and objects made me feel that I had ventured into another Mexico.(...) Our legacy derives from five centuries of mixing Indian and Spanish blood, but we must not overlook the Arabic heritage running through our veins, introduced by Spanirds bodies. We must not forget that for eight centuries two thirds of what is now Spain and Portugal was Arabic: the Andalusí civilization."
The enlarged sonoran family that finally fully emigrated to Mexico City, kept weekly meetings where he learned "the big pleasure of hearing and telling stories, and it was there that I felt growing inside me the desire of being a writer." A desire confirmed when he visited in 1975 and 1976 the Djemaa el Fna
square in Marrakech, where the Traditional Story Tellers made this place deserve to be declared Oral Human Heritage Site by Unesco in June 1997.
, his thesis director, of Michel Foucault
, Jacques Rancière
, André Chastel
and some others. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Paris, became an editor and a writer. Between 1984 and 1987, already in Mexico, he was managing editor of the magazine, Vuelta
, edited by Octavio Paz
. Who considered him "The strangest of Mexican writers, a true cosmopolite poet telling stories from a territory wider than just a country because he is the poet from the Skin. That is why his language is the Touch, the sense that implies all the others." The Cuban writer Severo Sarduy
wrote that he "invented not only novels but a new way of reading, the way of poetic lightning stroke."
. In February 2000 he was decorated by the French Government as Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. The Governor of Kentucky awarded him as "Kentucky Colonel", the highest distinction given in that State, where he also is Honnorary Citizen of Louisville. Between 1999 and 2003 he was appointed as Chairman of the Creative Non-Fiction Summer Program in the Banff Centre for the Arts, in Canada. In November 2006, The Editor's Guild of Mexico awarded him with the Premio Juan Pablos al Mérito Editorial, a life achievement recognition for 26 years of working as an editor and mainly for his work making of the publishing house, Artes de México, a leading cultural project in the Americas. He currently lives mainly in Mexico City, with his wife the historian Margarita De Orellana, coeditor of Artes de México, a daughter, Andrea, born in 1984, and a son, Santiago, born in 1987. His work as international lecturer keeps him traveling abroad, no more than his work as a researcher on rural Mexican cultures keeps him traveling inside Mexico.
Mexican people
Mexican people refers to all persons from Mexico, a multiethnic country in North America, and/or who identify with the Mexican cultural and/or national identity....
writer
Writer
A writer is a person who produces literature, such as novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, poetry, or other literary art. Skilled writers are able to use language to portray ideas and images....
and editor
Editor
The term editor may refer to:As a person who does editing:* Editor in chief, having final responsibility for a publication's operations and policies* Copy editing, making formatting changes and other improvements to text...
born in Mexico City
Mexico City
Mexico City is the Federal District , capital of Mexico and seat of the federal powers of the Mexican Union. It is a federal entity within Mexico which is not part of any one of the 31 Mexican states but belongs to the federation as a whole...
on 7 December 1951. He is an author of fiction
Fiction
Fiction is the form of any narrative or informative work that deals, in part or in whole, with information or events that are not factual, but rather, imaginary—that is, invented by the author. Although fiction describes a major branch of literary work, it may also refer to theatrical,...
, non-fiction
Non-fiction
Non-fiction is the form of any narrative, account, or other communicative work whose assertions and descriptions are understood to be fact...
and poetry
Poetry
Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...
. Since 1988 he has been the chief editor and founding publisher of Latin America’s leading arts magazine: Artes de Mexico. He has been visiting professor
Visiting scholar
In the world of academia, a visiting scholar or visiting academic is a scholar from an institution who visits a host university, where he or she is projected to teach , lecture , or perform research on a topic the visitor is valued for...
at several universities, including Stanford, Middlebury
Middlebury College
Middlebury College is a private liberal arts college located in Middlebury, Vermont, USA. Founded in 1800, it is one of the oldest liberal arts colleges in the United States. Drawing 2,400 undergraduates from all 50 United States and over 70 countries, Middlebury offers 44 majors in the arts,...
and La Sorbonne, and has been invited to give lectures in Europe, Africa, Asia and all the American Continent. His work has been praised by Octavio Paz
Octavio Paz
Octavio Paz Lozano was a Mexican writer, poet, and diplomat, and the winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature.-Early life and writings:...
, Juan Rulfo
Juan Rulfo
Juan Rulfo was a Mexican author and photographer. One of Latin America's most esteemed authors, Rulfo's reputation rests on two slim books, the novel Pedro Páramo , and El Llano en llamas...
, Severo Sarduy
Severo Sarduy
Severo Sarduy was a Cuban poet, author, playwright, and critic of Cuban literature and art.-Biography:...
, Alberto Manguel
Alberto Manguel
Alberto Manguel is a Canadian Argentine-born writer, translator, and editor. He is the author of numerous non-fiction books such as The Dictionary of Imaginary Places , A History of Reading , The Library at Night and Homer's Iliad and Odyssey: A Biography ; and novels such as News...
, Claude Michel Cluny and received awards from several international institutions.
Biographical
Joaquín Ruy Sánchez, his father, was born in the northern Mexican state of SonoraSonora
Sonora officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Sonora is one of the 31 states which, with the Federal District, comprise the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. It is divided into 72 municipalities; the capital city is Hermosillo....
, as well as his mother, María Antonieta Lacy. Alberto Ruy Sánchez was the first of five children. Following the hazardous working engagements of his father, the family used to live almost half of the year in Mexico City and the other half in the North of the country. Including longer residence periods in Ciudad Obregón, Sonora, and Villa Constitución
Villa Constitución
Villa Constitución is a city in the province of Santa Fe, Argentina, and the head town of the Constitución Department. It is located on the south-western banks of the Paraná River between the courses of the Arroyo Pavón and the Arroyo del Medio, about 214 km south from the provincial capital,...
, in the sonoran desert of Baja California
Baja California
Baja California officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Baja California is one of the 31 states which, with the Federal District, comprise the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. It is both the northernmost and westernmost state of Mexico. Before becoming a state in 1953, the area was known as the North...
, where he lived when he was between three and five years old. That gave him a unique and early experience of the desert.
Journey to Morocco
Experience that he forgot and suddenly recovered many years later, in 1975, when he visited the SaharaSahara
The Sahara is the world's second largest desert, after Antarctica. At over , it covers most of Northern Africa, making it almost as large as Europe or the United States. The Sahara stretches from the Red Sea, including parts of the Mediterranean coasts, to the outskirts of the Atlantic Ocean...
for the first time. From that involuntary act of memory he built a special creative relationship to the Moroccan desert, and mainly to the walled city of Essaouira
Essaouira
Mogador redirects here, for the hamlet in Surrey see Mogador, Surrey.Essaouira is a city in the western Moroccan economic region of Marrakech-Tensift-Al Haouz, on the Atlantic coast. Since the 16th century, the city has also been known by its Portuguese name of Mogador or Mogadore...
, the ancient Mogador, as main scenario for most of his novels. As he explains in his essay, The nine gifts that Morocco gave me, "My first trip to Mogador became a much longer and deeper journey. First came the shock of discovering a place that on spite of being so distant from Mexico provoked a strong impression of recognition, much greater than the one a Mexican receives upon arriving to Spain. A combination of body language, place and objects made me feel that I had ventured into another Mexico.(...) Our legacy derives from five centuries of mixing Indian and Spanish blood, but we must not overlook the Arabic heritage running through our veins, introduced by Spanirds bodies. We must not forget that for eight centuries two thirds of what is now Spain and Portugal was Arabic: the Andalusí civilization."
Inspirations
Before travelling to Morocco for the first time, as a teenager and later as college student, he received a severe humanistic education from Jesuit schools in Mexico. From which he kept "a Baroque, counterreformist idea of the world as a complex reality that can only be fully understood and enjoyed with all the senses." So, in his poetic and narrative writing there is always the baroque aim of "listening with the eyes, looking with the fingers and the ears, tasting with the smell, etc, as an artistic principle."The enlarged sonoran family that finally fully emigrated to Mexico City, kept weekly meetings where he learned "the big pleasure of hearing and telling stories, and it was there that I felt growing inside me the desire of being a writer." A desire confirmed when he visited in 1975 and 1976 the Djemaa el Fna
Djemaa el Fna
Jamaa el Fna is a square and market place in Marrakesh's medina quarter . The origin of its name is unclear: Jemaa means "congregational mosque" in Arabic, probably referring to a destroyed Almoravid mosque...
square in Marrakech, where the Traditional Story Tellers made this place deserve to be declared Oral Human Heritage Site by Unesco in June 1997.
A double search
A fourth biographical threat present in his work is the fact that he considers his novels as a search. A search of knowledge in both senses of: A. Investigating the mysteries of life; and B. Looking to go beyond our given material reality. His search has a name: Desire. He began writing as an effort to understand women's desire, through stories women told him and he witnessed. And that produced the novel Mogador, the names of the air. It opened a cycle including later En los labios del agua; Los Jardines secretos de Mogador; Nueve veces el asombro and a few other "mogadorian" titles, all of them written through almost twenty years. As each published book produced a massive reaction of mail by people telling their stories of desire, mainly by women, the author always considered them, heavily transformed, to nourish the stories deployed in the next book of the series. There could be an explanation for all this dimension of his 'work as a search' if we consider that, between the jobs he had while he was living in Paris, he was first a Tantra student and then a Tantra instructor. For a short time he was even working for a sexual therapist. The other sense of the term search in his books, the more spiritual or religious one, could also be linked to this Tantric period of his life. And it is evident when he declares his books as "material objects, geometrical compositions, that could help people think, feel, understand and improve their lives".Initiation
In 1975 he went to Paris, where he lived until 1983. There he followed the seminars of Roland BarthesRoland Barthes
Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, social theory, Marxism, anthropology and...
, his thesis director, of Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas...
, Jacques Rancière
Jacques Rancière
Jacques Rancière is a French philosopher, Professor of Philosophy at European Graduate School in Saas-Fee and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris Jacques Rancière (born Algiers, 1940) is a French philosopher, Professor of Philosophy at European Graduate School in Saas-Fee...
, André Chastel
André Chastel
André Chastel was a French art historian, author of an important work on the Italian Renaissance....
and some others. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Paris, became an editor and a writer. Between 1984 and 1987, already in Mexico, he was managing editor of the magazine, Vuelta
Vuelta (magazine)
Vuelta was a Mexican literary magazine, founded by poet Octavio Paz in 1976 following the controversial dismantling of the workers' cooperative that ran the daily newspaper Excélsior. It ceased publication following Paz's death in 1998....
, edited by Octavio Paz
Octavio Paz
Octavio Paz Lozano was a Mexican writer, poet, and diplomat, and the winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature.-Early life and writings:...
. Who considered him "The strangest of Mexican writers, a true cosmopolite poet telling stories from a territory wider than just a country because he is the poet from the Skin. That is why his language is the Touch, the sense that implies all the others." The Cuban writer Severo Sarduy
Severo Sarduy
Severo Sarduy was a Cuban poet, author, playwright, and critic of Cuban literature and art.-Biography:...
wrote that he "invented not only novels but a new way of reading, the way of poetic lightning stroke."
Moving Recognitions
Some of his books have been translated to several languages, French mainly, Portuguese, Italian, German, Arabic, Servian, Turkish, etc. They are kept in print in Spanish as they became cult objects: strange poetic long sellers since his first publication in 1987, when he was awarded the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize, the most prestigious literary recognition in Mexico. But only one has been published in English. The University of New Mexico awarded him as Literary essayist in 1991 and he was also a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial FoundationJohn Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation was founded in 1925 by Mr. and Mrs. Simon Guggenheim in memory of their son, who died April 26, 1922...
. In February 2000 he was decorated by the French Government as Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. The Governor of Kentucky awarded him as "Kentucky Colonel", the highest distinction given in that State, where he also is Honnorary Citizen of Louisville. Between 1999 and 2003 he was appointed as Chairman of the Creative Non-Fiction Summer Program in the Banff Centre for the Arts, in Canada. In November 2006, The Editor's Guild of Mexico awarded him with the Premio Juan Pablos al Mérito Editorial, a life achievement recognition for 26 years of working as an editor and mainly for his work making of the publishing house, Artes de México, a leading cultural project in the Americas. He currently lives mainly in Mexico City, with his wife the historian Margarita De Orellana, coeditor of Artes de México, a daughter, Andrea, born in 1984, and a son, Santiago, born in 1987. His work as international lecturer keeps him traveling abroad, no more than his work as a researcher on rural Mexican cultures keeps him traveling inside Mexico.
Awards
- 1987, Premio Xavier Villaurrutia for his novel Los nombres del aire.
- 1988, Fellowship, John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Nueva York.
- 1991, José Fuentes Mares National Prize for LiteratureJosé Fuentes Mares National Prize for LiteratureJosé Fuentes Mares National Prize for Literature is a Mexican literary award that has been presented annually since 1985 by the Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez. It is given to a Mexican author who has published a book in the form of short stories, poems or a novel...
, for his book Una introducción a Octavio PazOctavio PazOctavio Paz Lozano was a Mexican writer, poet, and diplomat, and the winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature.-Early life and writings:...
. New Mexico State University and Universidad de Ciudad Juarez. - 1993, Honorary Member of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores, México.
- 1998, Honorary Citizen of Louisville, Kentucky.
- 1999, Honorary Member of the chapter Mu Epsilon of the National Hispanic Society Sigma, Delta, Pi, in the USA.
- 1999. Kentucky Colonel, by the Governor of Kentucky.
- 2000. Prix des Trois Continents, for the French edition of his novel En los labios del agua.
- 2001. Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, by the French Government.
- 2002. Honorary Captain of the historical Steam Boat La belle de Louisville".
- 2003. Premio Cálamo, by Librería Cálamo and the Universidad de Zaragoza for Los Jardines Secretos de Mogador, Spain.
- 2005. Gran Orden de Honor Nacional al Mérito Autoral. By the . Mexico.
- 2006. Premio a la Excelencia de lo Nuestro. By the Fundación México Unido. México.
- 2006. Premio Juan Pablos al Mérito Editorial. By the Cámara Nacional de la Industria Editorial Mexicana (CANAIEM). Mexico.
External links
- Official blog
- Places of Longing Ruy Sánchez on Gabriel Figueroa Flores
- Alberto Ruy-Sanchez: Mexican Author: Ecrivain mexicain His main Site (in Spanish) with photos and more than a hundred texts, 30 on the author and 80 by him.
- A site in English at the Authors Guild with his statement on the gifts that Morocco gave him.
- A short bio in Spanish, by Elda García
- Hay patologías que ayudan a vivir: Alberto Ruy Sánchez - El Universal - Cultura An interview in Spanish for El Universal, by Sandra Licona at www.eluniversal.com.mx
- A fragment of "The secret Gardens of Mogador: The Garden of Voices"
- The Voices of the Earth