Born in 1928 in Panama. Mexican by nationality. Where he spent his childhood. At different times he has also lived in Quito, Montevideo, Rio de Janeiro, Washington, Santiago and Buenos Aires. As an adolescent he returned to Mexico, where he settled until 1965. The time he spent in his country left its mark on his body of work, steeped in the intellectual debate about the philosophy of all things Mexican. His first book, Los días enmascarados, was published in 1954. In 1955, together with Emmanuel Carballo and Octavio Paz, he founded the Revista Mexicana de Literatura. The fame he acquired with La región más transparente (1959) and The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962) confirmed him as one of the central figures in the boom of the Latin American novel. Like the other intellectuals involved in this phenomenon, his political and social engagement with the Cuban revolution influenced the contents of his work. In 1965, he began to move around again; he spent several periods in Paris and taught at Princeton, Harvard, Columbia and Cambridge. He continued to publish essays, including La nueva novel hispanoamericana (1969), in which he proposed a break with mannerist codes and the continuation of other traditions. Some of his most important novels are Zona sagrada and Cambio de piel (1967), Cumpleaños (1969), Terra Nostra (1975), Christopher Unborn (1987) and Diana: the Goddess who Hunts Alone (1972). His career as a writer has earned him various prizes.
