All prizes Mexico
Premio Xavier Villaurrutia de Escritores para Escritores
Mexico · Since 1955 · For books in Spanish
Mexico's prize "from writers to writers", given each year by a jury of past winners, with the National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature, to a book of any genre published in Mexico: novels, stories, poetry and essays. It names one winner, sometimes two, and no shortlist.
The critic Francisco Zendejas founded the prize in 1955. He had wanted to name it after Alfonso Reyes, who asked that it honour another writer instead, and it took the name of the poet Xavier Villaurrutia of the Contemporáneos group, who had just died. Its first winner was Juan Rulfo, for Pedro Páramo. The jury is made up of earlier winners, and the only condition is that the book was published in Mexico, so writers from other Spanish-speaking countries living there have won it too. In the 1970s several books were often honoured in one year, and some writers were honoured for their whole work. The prize was suspended in 1968 in protest at the jailing of José Revueltas. The winner for a year is usually announced in the course of the next one.
Villaurrutia 2024 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“The Women Workers”
Mónica Nepote · 54 when first published
Poetry
AI-generated summary:Mixing poetry and essay, the book borrows the vocabulary of the sewing machine and the typewriter to pay tribute to women's labour, from caring for others to making cloth in factories.
Villaurrutia 2023 · Winner
Christian Peña · 38 when first published
Poetry · Family
AI-generated summary:Poems built around the centaur Chiron, in three parts, 'Half Man', 'Asteroid and/or Comet' and 'Half Horse', in which the poet rethinks his past and present as a son and as a father.
Villaurrutia 2022 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“Gossip Corners of Memory”
Gonzalo Celorio · 74 when first published
Nonfiction
AI-generated summary:Part memoir, part essay, part tale, the book recalls writers the author knew personally, among them Arreola, Cortázar, Rulfo, Fuentes, Monterroso, García Márquez, Loynaz and Eco.
Villaurrutia 2021 · Winner
El invencible verano de Liliana
Cristina Rivera Garza · 57 when first published
Nonfiction · 320 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:The author returns to the death of her younger sister Liliana, an architecture student of twenty killed in July 1990 by a boyfriend from her school years who refused to let her go.
Villaurrutia 2020 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“Two-Pointed Star”
Malva Flores · 59 when first published
Nonfiction · Politics
AI-generated summary:The friendship between Octavio Paz and Carlos Fuentes over more than fifty years, told from witnesses, unpublished letters, official files and declassified papers, and with it the writers and politicians who shaped twentieth-century Mexico.
Villaurrutia 2019 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“The Seller of Silence”
Enrique Serna · 60 when first published
Novel · 485 pages · Historical, Politics
AI-generated summary:In mid-twentieth-century Mexico, the feared Excélsior columnist Carlos Denegri takes money for flattering the powerful in print, and even more for keeping their secrets out of it.
Villaurrutia 2018 · Winner
El lector a domicilio
Fabio Morábito · 63 when first published
Novel · 240 pages
AI-generated summary:Sentenced to a year of community service for a minor offence, Eduardo has to read novels aloud to sick and retired people in a provincial city, though he hardly grasps the words he reads.
Villaurrutia 2017 · Winner
David Toscana · 56 when first published
Novel · Crime
AI-generated summary:In Monterrey on the eve of the Cold War, an insomniac reader of newspapers who believes himself a great philosopher steals the mattress of a stabbed woman to get some sleep, and is drawn into investigating her murder.
Villaurrutia 2016 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“Song and Flight”
Alberto Blanco · 65 when first published
Nonfiction
AI-generated summary:Twelve essays, the final volume in the poet's three books about his craft, wander freely through times and places and ask how poetry connects with fields like science and ecology.
Villaurrutia 2015 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“Dreams of Reason”
Jorge Aguilar Mora · 69 when first published
Nonfiction · 278 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:The first volume of a year-by-year chronicle of the nineteenth century tells the history, ideas, life and disasters of 1799 and 1800 as they happen, without looking ahead, with figures such as Alexander von Humboldt.
Villaurrutia 2014 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“Family Self-Portrait with Dog”
Álvaro Uribe · 61 when first published
Novel · 242 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Born seven minutes after his twin, Adán has always been treated as the lesser brother by their mother, Malú; to find out why, the people who knew her, and even her dog Canuto, give their versions.
Villaurrutia 2013 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“On Phantom Freedoms, or Literature as Play”
José de la Colina · 79 when first published
Nonfiction · 203 pages
AI-generated summary:Essays on the playful side of literature and on subjects usually thought minor or not serious, from Cervantes imagining Don Quixote in prison to the harsh original Pinocchio of Carlo Collodi.
Villaurrutia 2012 · Winner
Tela de sevoya
Myriam Moscona · 57 when first published
Novel · 221 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Hoping to find the homes her parents left behind, their story and the Ladino tongue that Sephardic Jews carried out of medieval Spain, a Mexican woman journeys to Bulgaria.
Villaurrutia 2011 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“Spells”
Felipe Garrido · 69 when first published
Short stories · 296 pages
AI-generated summary:Three hundred and three very short stories, many under two pages, whose ordinary people, worried or hopeful, confront the marvels of the world while death and longing press on them.
Villaurrutia 2010 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“Fallen Leaves”
Sergio Mondragón · 70 when first published
Poetry
AI-generated summary:Poems about the magnetism that binds language, the body, the world and its landscapes to the poet, with his tricks and his visions, in a realm where everything appears transfigured.
Villaurrutia 2009 · Winner
Muerte en la rúa Augusta
Tedi López Mills · 50 when first published
Poetry · 190 pages
AI-generated summary:A narrative poem: after years as an office clerk, Gordon Smith loses his reason and his job and spends his days by the pool of his house outside Fullerton, California, or perhaps walking down a street in Lisbon.
Villaurrutia 2008 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“Journey to Mexico”
Adolfo Castañón · 56 when first published
Nonfiction · 374 pages
AI-generated summary:Essays, chronicles and portraits that probe Mexico as an imagined country, from Mayan ruins and the provinces to its public rituals and the writers of its twentieth century.
Villaurrutia 2007 · Winner
Cuaderno de Amorgós
Elsa Cross · 61 when first published
Poetry · 61 pages
AI-generated summary:A sequence of forty poems set on Amorgos, an island of the Greek Cyclades, where the poet's gaze on light, sea and stone turns into meditation and the landscape becomes a portrait of the inner life.
Villaurrutia 2007 · Winner
Santo y seña
Pura López Colomé · 55 when first published
Poetry · 176 pages
AI-generated summary:Poems that treat words as passwords, things among other things that open onto what they name: the stiff images of childhood, a bodily journey through the landscape of the spirit, the mind's lonely fire.
Villaurrutia 2006 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“Eden: An Imagined Life”
Alejandro Rossi · 74 when first published
Novel · 271 pages · Coming of age
AI-generated summary:In the years of the Second World War, young Alex, unsure where he belongs by country, origin, tongue or kin, settles into a luxurious hotel deep in provincial Argentina and makes it his refuge from the surrounding chaos.
Villaurrutia 2005 · Winner
David Huerta · 29 when first published
Poetry · 79 pages
AI-generated summary:Poems in long, dense lines where images grow out of one another in chains, closing in on everyday things, memories and desires until they glow with meaning, in search of a place where living might be worth it.
Villaurrutia 2004 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“The Life of Friar Servando”
Christopher Domínguez Michael · 42 when first published
Nonfiction · 802 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:A biography of Servando Teresa de Mier, the Dominican friar persecuted by the Inquisition who became a thinker of Mexico's independence and one of the country's first defenders of free speech.
Villaurrutia 2003 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“That Space, That Garden”
Coral Bracho · 52 when first published
Poetry
AI-generated summary:Poems that go back to a childhood in Zacatecas, beside a grandmother and within a large family, told through the senses rather than through events: children's voices by a lit pond, a hidden garden, the dead who return.
Villaurrutia 2003 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“With Death in His Fists”
Novel · 189 pages
AI-generated summary:Baby Cifuentes, a Mexican welterweight from the poorest margins of society, tells his own life in fifteen chapters called rounds, from a wretched childhood to his rise to fame.
Villaurrutia 2002 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“Pilgrimages”
Hugo Gutiérrez Vega · 68 when first published
Poetry
AI-generated summary:Nearly four decades of poems, from 1965 to 2001, in a plain, storytelling voice: love remembered and the body's pleasures, travels through cities and landscapes, and a humour that likes to pass for bitterness.
Villaurrutia 2002 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“At the Pace of Grass”
Juan Bañuelos · 70 when first published
Poetry · 197 pages
AI-generated summary:Poems about the state of Chiapas, in Mexico's south, chosen from the poet's work by Marco Antonio Campos, who also wrote the afterword.
Villaurrutia 2001 · Winner
Flores
Mario Bellatin · 41 when first published
Novel · 117 pages
AI-generated summary:Linked stories turn around a single centre: among their people are a scientist whose medicine left children born with malformed bodies and a writer who studies people with unusual sexual lives.