Authors Like Frida Kahlo

Leonora Carrington

English-Mexican · b. 1917 · Painter and writer

Carrington was born in Lancashire in 1917, joined the Surrealists in Paris with Max Ernst, and after a breakdown in 1940 was held against her will in a psychiatric institution in Santander, Spain. Down Below (1944) is her account of that confinement. She left New York for Mexico in 1942, became a Mexican citizen and lived in Mexico City until her death in 2011, where the painter Remedios Varo became her closest friend. The Hearing Trumpet (1974) is a comic novel about a ninety-two-year-old woman sent to a strange old people's home.

Anaïs Nin

French-Cuban · b. 1903 · Diarist

Nin began her diary in 1914, aged eleven, on the voyage from Europe to New York, and kept it for the rest of her life. The first volume was published in 1966 and made her famous; the unexpurgated volumes, beginning with Henry and June (1986), appeared after her death in 1977. Her fiction includes House of Incest (1936), and her erotica was published posthumously as Delta of Venus (1977).

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Elena Poniatowska

Mexican · b. 1932 · Novelist and journalist · Premio Cervantes 2013

Poniatowska was born in Paris in 1932 and has lived in Mexico since she was a child; she is one of the country's most important journalists and novelists. Querido Diego, te abraza Quiela (1978), translated as Dear Diego, is a short novel of twelve letters written in Paris in 1921–22 by the Russian painter Angelina Beloff to Diego Rivera, who had left her and gone home to Mexico. Her novel Leonora (2011), about Leonora Carrington, won the Premio Biblioteca Breve, and in 2013 she won the Premio Cervantes.

Georgia O'Keeffe

American · b. 1887 · Painter

O'Keeffe was the leading American modernist painter of flowers, bones and the New Mexico desert, and married the photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz in 1924. My Faraway One (Yale, 2011), edited by Sarah Greenough, collects more than 650 of their letters from 1915 to 1933. She and Kahlo first met in December 1931, at Diego Rivera's retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, and Kahlo wrote to her in 1933 during O'Keeffe's breakdown.

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Audre Lorde

American · b. 1934 · Poet and essayist

Lorde was a New York poet who described herself as “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet”. The Cancer Journals (1980), drawn partly from her journals, is about her breast cancer and mastectomy; Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982) is what she called a biomythography; Sister Outsider (1984) collects her essays and speeches. She was New York State poet laureate in 1991–92.

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Hayden Herrera

American · b. 1940 · Biographer

Herrera is an American art historian, born in Boston in 1940, who wrote her 1981 doctoral thesis on Kahlo. Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo (Harper & Row, 1983) grew out of it and became the basis for Julie Taymor's 2002 film Frida, with Salma Hayek. She has also written lives of Matisse, Arshile Gorky and Isamu Noguchi.

Barbara Kingsolver

American · b. 1955 · Novelist · Pulitzer 2023

Kingsolver trained as a biologist and writes large, morally serious novels rooted in a real place. The Lacuna, which won the Orange Prize in 2010, follows Harrison Shepherd, an American boy raised in Mexico who works in the household of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, meets Leon Trotsky, and is later caught up in an anti-communist scandal in the United States. Demon Copperhead (2022) won the Pulitzer Prize and the Women's Prize in 2023.

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Sylvia Plath

American · b. 1932 · Poet · Pulitzer 1982

Plath kept journals from 1950 until shortly before her death in 1963; The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, edited by Karen V. Kukil, printed them in full in 2000. Ariel, published after her death in 1965, contains the poems she is best known for, and her Collected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize in 1982. Her one novel, The Bell Jar, appeared in 1963.

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Virginia Woolf

English · b. 1882 · Novelist and essayist

Woolf rebuilt the English novel around consciousness and argued in A Room of One's Own (1929) for the money and privacy a woman needs to make art. Her diary, kept from 1915 until her death in 1941, was published in five volumes between 1977 and 1984. She lived with recurring illness for most of her adult life.

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Patti Smith

American · b. 1946 · Musician and memoirist · National Book Award 2010

Smith was born in Chicago in 1946; her first album, Horses, came out in 1975. Just Kids, about her years with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in New York from 1967, won the National Book Award for nonfiction in 2010. M Train (2015) is a book of travels and preoccupations that includes a visit to Kahlo's Casa Azul in Coyoacán.

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