Alberto Ruy Sánchez Lacy is a Mexican writer and editor born in Mexico City on 7 December 1951. He is an author of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Since 1988 he has been the chief editor and founding publisher of Latin America’s leading arts magazine: Artes de Mexico. He has been visiting professor at several universities, including Stanford, Middlebury and La Sorbonne, and has been invited to give lectures in Europe, Africa, Asia and all the American Continent. His work has been praised by Octavio Paz, Juan Rulfo, Severo Sarduy, Alberto Manguel, Claude Michel Cluny and received awards from several international institutions.
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Joaquín Ruy Sánchez, his father, was born in the northern Mexican state of Sonora, as well as his mother, María Antonieta Lacy. Alberto Ruy Sánchez was the first of five children. Following the hazardous working engagements of his father, the family used to live almost half of the year in Mexico City and the other half in the North of the country. Including longer residence periods in Ciudad Obregón, Sonora, and Villa Constitución, in the sonoran desert of Baja California, where he lived when he was between three and five years old. That gave him a unique and early experience of the desert.
Experience that he forgot and suddenly recovered many years later, in 1975, when he visited the Sahara for the first time. From that involuntary act of memory he built a special creative relationship to the Moroccan desert, and mainly to the walled city of Essaouira, the ancient Mogador, as main scenario for most of his novels. As he explains in his essay, The nine gifts that Morocco gave me,[1] "My first trip to Mogador became a much longer and deeper journey. First came the shock of discovering a place that on spite of being so distant from Mexico provoked a strong impression of recognition, much greater than the one a Mexican receives upon arriving to Spain. A combination of body language, place and objects made me feel that I had ventured into another Mexico.(...) Our legacy derives from five centuries of mixing Indian and Spanish blood, but we must not overlook the Arabic heritage running through our veins, introduced by Spanirds bodies. We must not forget that for eight centuries two thirds of what is now Spain and Portugal was Arabic: the Andalusí civilization."
Before travelling to Morocco for the first time, as a teenager and later as college student, he received a severe humanistic education from Jesuit schools in Mexico. From which he kept "a Baroque, counterreformist idea of the world as a complex reality that can only be fully understood and enjoyed with all the senses." So, in his poetic and narrative writing there is always the baroque aim of "listening with the eyes, looking with the fingers and the ears, tasting with the smell, etc, as an artistic principle." [2]
The enlarged sonoran family that finally fully emigrated to Mexico City, kept weekly meetings where he learned "the big pleasure of hearing and telling stories, and it was there that I felt growing inside me the desire of being a writer." [3] A desire confirmed when he visited in 1975 and 1976 the Djemaa el Fna square in Marrakech, where the Traditional Story Tellers made this place deserve to be declared Oral Human Heritage Site by Unesco in June 1997. [4]
A fourth biographical threat present in his work is the fact that he considers his novels as a search. A search of knowledge in both senses of: A. Investigating the mysteries of life; and B. Looking to go beyond our given material reality. His search has a name: Desire. He began writing as an effort to understand women's desire, through stories women told him and he witnessed. And that produced the novel Mogador, the names of the air. It opened a cycle including later En los labios del agua; Los Jardines secretos de Mogador; Nueve veces el asombro and a few other "mogadorian" titles, all of them written through almost twenty years. As each published book produced a massive reaction of mail by people telling their stories of desire, mainly by women, the author always considered them, heavily transformed, to nourish the stories deployed in the next book of the series. There could be an explanation for all this dimension of his 'work as a search' if we consider that, between the jobs he had while he was living in Paris, he was first a Tantra student and then a Tantra instructor. For a short time he was even working for a sexual therapist. The other sense of the term search in his books, the more spiritual or religious one, could also be linked to this Tantric period of his life. And it is evident when he declares his books as "material objects, geometrical compositions, that could help people think, feel, understand and improve their lives".
In 1975 he went to Paris, where he lived until 1983. There he followed the seminars of Roland Barthes, his thesis director, of Michel Foucault, Jacques Rancière, André Chastel and some others. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Paris, became an editor and a writer. Between 1984 and 1987, already in Mexico, he was managing editor of the magazine, Vuelta, edited by Octavio Paz. Who considered him "The strangest of Mexican writers, a true cosmopolite poet telling stories from a territory wider than just a country because he is the poet from the Skin. That is why his language is the Touch, the sense that implies all the others." The Cuban writer Severo Sarduy wrote that he "invented not only novels but a new way of reading, the way of poetic lightning stroke." [5]
Some of his books have been translated to several languages, French mainly, Portuguese, Italian, German, Arabic, Servian, Turkish, etc. They are kept in print in Spanish as they became cult objects: strange poetic long sellers since his first publication in 1987, when he was awarded the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize, the most prestigious literary recognition in Mexico. But only one has been published in English. The University of New Mexico awarded him as Literary essayist in 1991 and he was also a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In February 2000 he was decorated by the French Government as Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. The Governor of Kentucky awarded him as "Kentucky Colonel", the highest distinction given in that State, where he also is Honnorary Citizen of Louisville. Between 1999 and 2003 he was appointed as Chairman of the Creative Non-Fiction Summer Program in the Banff Centre for the Arts, in Canada. In November 2006, The Editor's Guild of Mexico awarded him with the Premio Juan Pablos al Mérito Editorial, a life achievement recognition for 26 years of working as an editor and mainly for his work making of the publishing house, Artes de México, a leading cultural project in the Americas. He currently lives mainly in Mexico City, with his wife the historian Margarita De Orellana, coeditor of Artes de México, a daughter, Andrea, born in 1984, and a son, Santiago, born in 1987. His work as international lecturer keeps him traveling abroad, no more than his work as a researcher on rural Mexican cultures keeps him traveling inside Mexico.
Novels
Short Stories
Essays
Poetry