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Authors by Country · MexicoThe Best Mexican Authors to Read
Mexican literature runs from the convent poetry of seventeenth-century New Spain to some of the most widely translated fiction being written in Spanish today. The Revolution of 1910–1920 shaped much of its twentieth-century writing, from war novels to ghost towns and essays on national identity. More recent writers have turned to the border, migration, violence against women and family life, and many of them are now published quickly in English.
This list is ordered chronologically by year of birth, from Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (born 1648) to Guadalupe Nettel (born 1973). It mixes canonical names with living writers, and every author has at least one book available in English translation. For each one there is a suggested first book, with its original publication year, and often a second title to read next.
Twelve Mexican authors, and where to start with each
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
1648–1695 · San Miguel Nepantla, New Spain (Mexico)
Sor Juana was a nun, poet and scholar in colonial Mexico City. She wrote love poems, religious verse, playful occasional pieces and the long philosophical poem First Dream. Her best-known prose work, the Response to Sor Filotea, defends a woman’s right to study, teach and write, after a bishop published one of her letters and she was reprimanded.
She died in 1695 after nursing fellow nuns during an epidemic. Her birth year is still debated, as two baptism records, from 1648 and 1651, have been linked to her. The Penguin Classics selection translated by Margaret Sayers Peden is a convenient bilingual introduction.
Read Sor Juana if you want to hear the earliest major voice in Mexican literature, and an early defence of women’s learning.
Start with Poems, Protest, and a Dream (1997). A bilingual Penguin Classics selection, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden, that includes the Response to Sor Filotea, a translation of First Dream, sonnets, love poems and religious verse.
Mariano Azuela
1873–1952 · Lagos de Moreno, Jalisco, Mexico
Azuela was a medical doctor who served as a field doctor with forces linked to Pancho Villa during the Mexican Revolution. The Underdogs draws on that experience. It follows rebel soldiers from the inside and shows the Revolution as chaotic and often futile, with opportunists rising to power while the poor majority gain little.
The novel first appeared as a newspaper serial in El Paso, Texas, in 1915, while Azuela was living there, and was not widely recognised until 1924. Several English translations exist; the Penguin Classics edition by Sergio Waisman has a foreword by Carlos Fuentes.
Read Azuela if you want the Mexican Revolution as seen by the men who fought in it.
Start with The Underdogs (1915). A short novel following a band of rebel soldiers through the Mexican Revolution, from early victories to disillusion.
Octavio Paz
1914–1998 · Mexico City, Mexico
Paz was a poet and essayist who wrote about Mexican identity, love, time, India and art. The Labyrinth of Solitude, written in Paris and published in 1950, examines masks, festivals, death and the mixed Spanish and Indigenous heritage of Mexico. His long poem Sunstone (1957) is among his best-known poems.
He was also a diplomat: Mexico’s ambassador to India from 1962, he resigned in 1968 in protest at the Tlatelolco massacre of student demonstrators. He founded the magazines Plural and Vuelta, received the Cervantes Prize in 1981 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1990.
Read Paz if you want essays and poems that try to explain Mexico to itself.
Start with The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950). A collection of essays on Mexican identity, solitude, festivals, death and history; first published in English in 1961. Or The Collected Poems 1957–1987 (1987). A large English-language collection of the poetry Paz wrote over three decades.
All Octavio Paz books →Elena Garro
1916–1998 · Puebla, Mexico
Garro wrote novels, stories and plays in which time, memory and small-town life blur together. Her first novel, Recollections of Things to Come, won the Xavier Villaurrutia Award in 1963. It uses touches of magical realism, such as a moment when time stops, several years before García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.
She was married to Octavio Paz from 1937 to 1959 and later wrote bitterly about the marriage. Ruth L. C. Simms’s English translation of her first novel was published by the University of Texas Press in 1969, and two later novellas are available in English as First Love & Look for My Obituary.
Read Garro if you liked Pedro Páramo and want another Mexican town where memory and time misbehave.
Start with Recollections of Things to Come (1963). The town of Ixtepec, occupied by the army during the Cristero War, tells the story of the despotic General Rosas and the two women who become his mistresses.
Juan Rulfo
1917–1986 · Apulco, Jalisco, Mexico
Rulfo’s reputation rests on two short books, the story collection The Burning Plain and the novel Pedro Páramo. Both are set in rural Jalisco and deal with poverty, land, violence, memory and death in places that seem half-abandoned, in plain and very compressed prose.
His influence on later Latin American writers is far larger than his output. He was also a photographer; the Juan Rulfo Foundation holds more than 6,000 of his negatives. Margaret Sayers Peden translated Pedro Páramo in 1994, and Douglas J. Weatherford published a new translation in 2023.
Read Rulfo if you want a short, haunting novel that shaped a whole generation of writers.
Start with Pedro Páramo (1955). Juan Preciado travels to the town of Comala to find his father, Pedro Páramo, and finds it populated by the voices of the dead. Or The Burning Plain (1953). Short stories of rural Mexico, translated into English by George D. Schade in 1967.
All Juan Rulfo books →Rosario Castellanos
1925–1974 · Mexico City, Mexico
Castellanos wrote about Chiapas, in southern Mexico, and the divisions there between ladino landowners and Indigenous Tzotzil and Tzeltal Maya communities, as well as the limits placed on women’s lives. Her novels, poems and essays return to language, loneliness, class and race, and she is widely read as one of Mexico’s central feminist writers.
She was appointed ambassador to Israel in 1971 and died in Tel Aviv in 1974, aged 49, after being electrocuted. Her two Chiapas novels are available in English as The Nine Guardians and The Book of Lamentations, and a selection of her poems was translated by Magda Bogin.
Read Castellanos if you want fiction about race, class and women’s lives in southern Mexico.
Start with The Nine Guardians (1957). Her first novel, Balún Canán, about ladino and Indigenous lives in Chiapas; translated by Irene Nicholson and reissued by Readers International in 1992. Or The Book of Lamentations (1962). Oficio de tinieblas, a novel about Indigenous communities and ladino landowners in Chiapas; translated by Esther Allen for Penguin in 1998.
Carlos Fuentes
1928–2012 · Panama City, Panama
Fuentes wrote large, ambitious novels about Mexican history, power and identity, from Where the Air Is Clear (1958), set in Mexico City, to the historical novel Terra Nostra (1975). He experimented with voice and time, and also wrote shorter work such as the novella Aura (1962).
He received the Rómulo Gallegos Prize in 1977 for Terra Nostra, the Cervantes Prize in 1987 and the Prince of Asturias Award in 1994. The Old Gringo (1985) is another good entry point. He died in Mexico City in 2012.
Read Fuentes if you want a big political novel about what became of the Revolution.
Start with The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962). On his deathbed, a corrupt former revolutionary turned tycoon looks back over his life in non-chronological fragments; translated by Alfred MacAdam in 1991. Or The Old Gringo (1985). A later, shorter novel set during the Mexican Revolution.
Elena Poniatowska
1932– · Paris, France
Poniatowska was born in Paris and moved to Mexico at the age of ten. As a journalist and novelist she gives space to people who are rarely heard: Massacre in Mexico (1971) assembles testimonies of the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre, and her novels often draw on real lives, including that of the painter Leonora Carrington in Leonora (2011).
She received the Rómulo Gallegos Prize in 2007 and the Cervantes Prize in 2013, and is still writing in her nineties. Here’s to You, Jesusa! is the easiest way in.
Read Poniatowska if you want working-class Mexican lives told in their own voices.
Start with Here’s to You, Jesusa! (1969). A novel based on the life of a real working-class woman who fought with a cavalry unit in the Revolution and later scraped a living in Mexico City. Or Massacre in Mexico (1971). An oral history of the 1968 killing of student protesters at Tlatelolco, built from eyewitness accounts.
Laura Esquivel
1950– · Mexico City, Mexico
Esquivel is best known for Like Water for Chocolate, a family novel set on a ranch in which cooking carries emotion; its English edition is subtitled ‘a novel in monthly installments, with recipes, romances, and home remedies’. It became an international bestseller and was filmed in 1992, the year it appeared in English.
Her later novels include The Law of Love (1995), translated by Margaret Sayers Peden, and Malinche (2006). She has also been active in politics and was elected to Mexico’s Chamber of Deputies for the Morena party in 2015.
Read Esquivel if you want a warm, romantic family novel with food at its centre.
Start with Like Water for Chocolate (1989). Tita, the youngest daughter, is forbidden to marry the man she loves and pours her feelings into her cooking, with startling effects on everyone who eats it; translated by Carol and Thomas Christensen.
Cristina Rivera Garza
1964– · Matamoros, Tamaulipas, Mexico
Rivera Garza writes novels, essays and nonfiction that cross genres and often deal with violence, the body, illness and memory. She trained as a historian and wrote her doctorate on mental asylums in early twentieth-century Mexico, and her novels No One Will See Me Cry and The Taiga Syndrome are both available in English.
She teaches at the University of Houston, where she founded a PhD programme in creative writing in Spanish, and received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2020. Her memoir about her murdered sister won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Memoir or Autobiography.
Read Rivera Garza if you want writing that refuses to look away from violence against women.
Start with Liliana’s Invincible Summer (2021). A memoir about the author’s sister, a 20-year-old architecture student murdered by a former boyfriend in 1990, combining archives, letters and an account of femicide in Mexico; published in English in 2023. Or The Taiga Syndrome (2012). A short, unsettling novel that won a Shirley Jackson Award in 2018; translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana.
Yuri Herrera
1970– · Actopan, Hidalgo, Mexico
Herrera writes very short novels about borders, migration, drug lords and the people caught up around them, in compressed prose that mixes slang with an almost mythical tone. His settings are recognisable as Mexico and the United States without being named precisely.
Signs Preceding the End of the World won the Best Translated Book Award in 2016. All his main books are translated by Lisa Dillman for And Other Stories, including Kingdom Cons and The Transmigration of Bodies. He teaches at Tulane University in New Orleans.
Read Herrera if you want short, intense novels about the border that you can finish in an evening.
Start with Signs Preceding the End of the World (2009). A young woman crosses from Mexico into the United States to deliver a package and bring her brother home; translated by Lisa Dillman in 2015. Or The Transmigration of Bodies (2013). A short novel set in a city during an epidemic, also translated by Lisa Dillman.
Guadalupe Nettel
1973– · Mexico City, Mexico
Nettel writes about bodies, families and the uneasy parts of everyday life, with a cool, observant eye for strangeness. Her work in English includes the story collections Natural Histories and Bezoar and Other Unsettling Stories, and the novel The Body Where I Was Born, all from Seven Stories Press.
She won the Herralde Prize in 2014 for After the Winter and the Ribera del Duero short fiction prize in 2013. Still Born, translated by Rosalind Harvey, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2023.
Read Nettel if you want quiet, precise contemporary fiction about motherhood and family.
Start with Still Born (2020). Two friends face motherhood from opposite directions: Laura has decided never to have children, while Alina’s long-awaited baby is diagnosed with a serious brain condition. Or Natural Histories (2013). Five short stories, translated by J. T. Lichtenstein, that won the Ribera del Duero prize in Spain.
Which Mexican author should you read first?
The best starting point depends on what you want from a book.
- For a short, haunting classic — Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo (1955)
- For the Mexican Revolution — Mariano Azuela, The Underdogs (1915)
- For essays on Mexican identity — Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950)
- For a romantic family novel — Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate (1989)
- For a novella about the border — Yuri Herrera, Signs Preceding the End of the World (2009)
- For powerful nonfiction — Cristina Rivera Garza, Liliana’s Invincible Summer (2021)
Where to go next
Frequently asked questions
Who is the most famous Mexican author?
Octavio Paz, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1990, is the best-known internationally. Among novelists, Juan Rulfo and Carlos Fuentes are the names most often cited, and Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo is a common first choice.
Has a Mexican author won the Nobel Prize in Literature?
Yes. Octavio Paz received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1990. Paz, Carlos Fuentes and Elena Poniatowska have also won the Cervantes Prize, the most important award for Spanish-language literature.
What is the best Mexican novel to start with?
Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo is short and often recommended first. For something more contemporary and equally brief, try Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World.
Who are the best contemporary Mexican writers?
Living writers widely read in English include Cristina Rivera Garza, Yuri Herrera and Guadalupe Nettel, as well as Fernanda Melchor and Valeria Luiselli, who appear on the Latin American authors list.
Which Mexican authors write about the Revolution?
Mariano Azuela’s The Underdogs was written during the Revolution itself. Carlos Fuentes’s The Death of Artemio Cruz looks at what became of it, and Elena Poniatowska’s Here’s to You, Jesusa! follows a woman who fought in it.
Are there Mexican women writers on this list?
Yes, more than half: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Elena Garro, Rosario Castellanos, Elena Poniatowska, Laura Esquivel, Cristina Rivera Garza and Guadalupe Nettel.
Start with the author whose questions interest you most. The book you remember longest may not be the one with the clearest answers, but the one that changes how you see something familiar.
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