The novel Leonora by Elena Poniatowska, recipient of the 2011 Biblioteca Breve Prize, Seix Borral in its 25th edition, is already on sale in bookstores across Mexico and Spain.
This is a fiction work whose main character is inspired in the life of British-origin painter Leonora Carrington. It tells the story of a rebel-spirited woman born with a silver spoon in her mouth.
“I think (Carrington) is increasingly stronger and will become even stronger as time rolls on. She’s indeed as unique as Frida Kahlo in her time, only that she didn’t want to go public,” Elena Poniatowska said.
As a fantasizing and eccentric child, a defiant teenager, Leonora lived the most turbulent love story with painter Max Ernst. She went through a whirlpool of surrealism with him and rubbed elbows in Paris with Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miro, André Breton and Pablo Picasso. For Max she went crazy when he was sent to a concentration camp. Leonora was admitted in a bughouse in Santander, but she fled the place and went out for the conquest of New York by the hand of Peggy Guggenheim. Eventually she settled down in Mexico.
Among the boldface names that have previously won this prize there are authors like Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Vicente Leñero and Juan Marsé, and now Mexico’s Elena Poniatowska (France, 1932), joins the list. She’s living in Mexico and is a close friend of Leonora Carrington’s, 94, who’s still penciled in as a living legend of surrealism.
The jury was made up of Jose Manuel Caballero Bonald, Pere Gimferrer, Rosa Montero, Dario Villanueva and Elena Ramirez
Elena Poniatowska, who has interviewed Carrington for over half a century, was always fascinated by the life of this woman who used to run away from her babysitters as a child to find shelter in museums, lured by the work of Piero Della Francesca, del Bosco and Arcimboldo’s faces.
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