Cristina Rivera Garza, researcher at the Faculty of Philology and Communication and writer, wins Pulitzer Prize
Linked to the Grup d’Estudis Literaris Transnacionals (Transnational Literary Studies Group), coordinated by Professor Dúnia Gras (Department of Hispanic Philology, Literary Theory and Communication), Cristina Rivera Garza (Matamoros, Mexico, 1964) was one of the winners of the latest edition of the Pulitzer Prize, awarded annually by Columbia University. Specifically, she has been given this award for the book Liliana's Invincible Summer, in which she explains the murder of her sister, which took place in 1990. The jury highlighted Rivera’s commitment to the combination of genres in this work, in which she combines memory, investigative journalism with a feminist perspective and poetic biography around the feeling of loss. The book was published in 2021, originally in Spanish, and the author herself translated it into English, published in 2023. The presentation in Barcelona featured a dialogue (available online) between the author and Dúnia Gras, expert in Spanish-American literature.
Linked to the Grup d’Estudis Literaris Transnacionals (Transnational Literary Studies Group), coordinated by Professor Dúnia Gras (Department of Hispanic Philology, Literary Theory and Communication), Cristina Rivera Garza (Matamoros, Mexico, 1964) was one of the winners of the latest edition of the Pulitzer Prize, awarded annually by Columbia University. Specifically, she has been given this award for the book Liliana's Invincible Summer, in which she explains the murder of her sister, which took place in 1990. The jury highlighted Rivera’s commitment to the combination of genres in this work, in which she combines memory, investigative journalism with a feminist perspective and poetic biography around the feeling of loss. The book was published in 2021, originally in Spanish, and the author herself translated it into English, published in 2023. The presentation in Barcelona featured a dialogue (available online) between the author and Dúnia Gras, expert in Spanish-American literature.
Rivera Garza, who graduated from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) with a degree in Sociology and a PhD in Latin American History from the University of Houston, has taught on the master’s degree in Construction and Representation of Cultural Identities, and combines her work as a writer and María Zambrano postdoctoral researcher with directing the PhD programme in Creative Writing in Spanish at the University of Houston, among other activities. Author, translator and critic, she is considered one of the most relevant voices in Latin American literature today and has an extensive track record of recognition: she has won the Shirley Jackson Prize 2018, the Ibero-American José Donoso Letters Prize 2021, the Nuevo León Alfonso Reyes Prize 2021, the Mazatlán Literature Prize 2021, the Xavier Villaurrutia Writers’ Prize for Writers 2021, and the Rodolfo Walsh Prize 2022. In 2020, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.
Some of her most recent books are Autobiografía del algodón (Literatura Random House, 2020), Liliana's Invincible Summer (Penguin Random House, 2021), y Grieving: Dispatches from a wounded country (The Feminist Press, 2020).