Elena Poniatowska
Mexico
Assembles real, transcribed voices into a collaged chorus that reads as documentary reportage and elegy in the same breath.
Poniatowska was born in Paris to an aristocratic family descended from Poland's last king, and fled with her mother to Mexico as a child during the Second World War, arriving speaking French and English before Spanish. She began as a society reporter for a Mexico City newspaper, a post she used to sneak into interviews serious journalists were denied.
She helped pioneer the testimonio, a genre built from transcribed oral accounts of ordinary people, most powerfully in Massacre in Mexico, her collage of survivor testimony from the 1968 Tlatelolco student killings, and in Here's to You, Jesusa!, based on years of interviews with a washerwoman and Revolutionary War veteran.
She has continued writing and reporting into her nineties, and received the Cervantes Prize, Spanish letters' highest honor, in 2013.
Their books in the atlas
- 1969
Here's to You, Jesusa!Lvl 5autobiographical fiction - 1971
Massacre in MexicoLvl 5historical fiction
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