Elena Poniatowska

Elena Poniatowska
Poniatowska at the Miami Book Fair International 2014
Born	(1932-05-19) May 19, 1932 (age 84) Paris, France
Occupation	Journalist, author
Spouse(s)	Guillermo Haro (deceased)
Children	Emmanuel Haro Poniatowski (1955) Felipe Haro Poniatowski (1968) Paula Haro Poniatowski (1970)
Awards	Miguel de Cervantes Prize 2013

Elena Poniatowska  audio  (born May 19, 1932) is a French-born Mexican journalist and author, specializing in works on social and political issues focused on those considered to be disenfranchised especially women and the poor. She was born in Paris to upper class parents, including her mother whose family fled Mexico during the Mexican Revolution. She left France for Mexico when she was ten to escape the Second World War. When she was eighteen and without a university education, she began writing for the newspaper Excélsior, doing interviews and society columns. Despite the lack of opportunity for women from the 1950s to the 1970s, she evolved to writing about social and political issues in newspapers, books in both fiction and nonfiction form. Her best known work is La noche de Tlatelolco (The night of Tlatelolco, the English translation was titled "Massacre in Mexico") about the repression of the 1968 student protests in Mexico City. She is considered to be “Mexico's grande dame of letters” and is still an active writer.

Her father was Polish-French, Jean Joseph Évremond Sperry Poniatowski, born to the family distantly related to the last king of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Stanisław August Poniatowski. Her mother was France-born heiress María Dolores Paulette Amor Yturbe, whose Mexican family lost land and fled Mexico after the outster of Porfirio Díaz during the Mexican Revolution. Poniatowska's extended family includes an archbishop, the primate of Poland, a musician, several writers and statesmen including Benjamin Franklin. Her aunt was the poet Pita Amor. She was raised in France by a grandfather who was a writer and a grandmother who would show her negative photos about Mexico, including photographs in National Geographic depicting Africans, saying they were Mexican indigenes, and scaring her and her siblings with stories about cannibalism there. Although she maintained a close relationship with her mother until her death, the mother was unhappy about her daughter being labeled a "communist" and refused to read Poniatowska's novel about political activist Tina Modotti.