Jose Emilio Pacheco dies at 74; one of Mexico’s foremost writers

Jose Emilio Pacheco, widely regarded as one of Mexico’s foremost poets and short-story writers, died Sunday, the country’s National Council for Culture and the Arts announced on its official Twitter account. He was 74.

President Enrique Peña Nieto also mourned Pacheco with his own tweet after Pacheco’s daughter confirmed the death to journalists in Mexico City.

The poet, novelist, journalist, essayist and literary critic came to be seen as a leading representative of the generation of Mexican writers who came of age in the late 1950s and 1960s.

He was best known for bittersweet accounts of adolescents growing up in a less crowded but corrupt and unjust Mexico of the 1940s and ‘50s. He was particularly noted for the 1981 novel “Battles in the Desert,” a story of a boy’s infatuation with the mother of one of his classmates.

Born June 30, 1939, in Mexico City, Pacheco began publishing his writing as a teenager, and in 1957 began publishing the literary magazine Estaciones with fellow university students Carlos Monsivais and Sergio Pitol, according to an official biography published in 2009 when he won the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world’s highest literary honor.

His first collection of stories was published in 1958. He followed with a series of poems and story collections in the 1960s. He became editor of Culture, one of most important literary publications in Mexico, and published a widely praised series of prose and poetry over the following decades.

Pacheco also translated works by Samuel Beckett, Tennessee Williams and T.S. Eliot.

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