August 1, 2023, 7:41am
Mexican author Guadalupe Nettel has been named as the latest recipient of the prestigious El Grand Balam award, a $150,000 prize awarded in three annual tranches and intended to support mid-career writers. The award, sometimes referred to as the “Borchard Prize,” is bestowed by the Borchard Foundation Center on Literary Arts in Southern California and will be officially handed out at a January 2024 ceremony.
Nettel is the author most recently of the novel La Hija Unica (Still Born), which was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, along with three other novels and five short story collections, including Natural Histories, which won the Ribera del Duero International Award for Short Narratives. Nettel has also written two nonfiction books.
The Borchard Foundation Center described Nettel’s work as exceptional due to “her intimate psychological explorations of individuals marginalized from themselves by an often cruel, inexplicable, and wonderous world.”
Nettel lives in Mexico City, and is the second female director of Revista de la Universidad de Mexico. Congratulations, Guadalupe!