Mario Bellatin

Mario Bellatin
Born	Mexico City, Mexico
Education	University of Lima

Mario Bellatin (born July 23, 1960, Mexico City, Mexico) is a Mexican novelist.

Biography

Mario Bellatin grew up in Peru as the son of Peruvian parents. He spent two years studying theology at the seminary Santo Toribio de Mogrovejo and graduated from the University of Lima. In 1987, Bellatin moved to Cuba, where he studied screenplay writing at the International Film School Latinoamericana.^[1] On his return to Mexico in 1995, he became the director of the Department of Literature and Humanities at the University of the Cloister of Sor Juana and became a member of the National System of Creators of Mexico from 1999 to 2005. He is currently the director of the School of Writers Dynamics in Mexico City.

Works

His work is widely known and distributed, with translations into English, German and French. While he has participated in writing workshops around the United States, his work is very little known in the English-speaking world. Bellatin is celebrated as a leading voice in Spanish fiction for his experimental and fragmented writing, which artfully intertwines reality and creation. As a result of a birth defect that left him missing much of his right arm, a good portion of his fiction concerns characters that are deformed or diseased or with an uncertain sexual identity.^[2] Bellatin was quoted in the New York Times as saying, "To me literature is a game, a search for ways to break through borders. But in my work the rules of the game are always obvious, the guts are exposed, and you can see what is being cooked up.”

Awards

• National Book Award, Sponsored by Municipal Institute of Culture, Tourism and Art of Mazatlan, 2008
• Guggenheim grant, 2002

Selected Works

• Flores (Anagrama, 2004)
• The Large Glass (Anagram, 2007)
• Chinese Checkers, trans. Cooper Renner (Ravenna Press, 2007) ISBN 978-0977616299
• Beauty Salon, trans. Kurt Hollander (City Lights Publishers, 2009) ISBN 978-0872864733

References

1. ^ Lecturalia S.L.. "Mario Bellatin - Libros y obras del autor, biografía y bibliografía". Lecturalia. http://www.lecturalia.com/autor/1128/mario-bellatin. Retrieved 2010-07-22. 
2. ^ Rohter, Larry (August 10, 2009). "A Mischievous Novelist With an Eye and an Ear for the Unusual". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/10/books/10bellatin.html. 

External links

• Bellatin in Molossus
• Review of Beauty Salon
• Review of Chinese Checkers
• Larry Rohter. A Mischievous Novelist With an Eye and an Ear for the Unusual, New York Times, 2009-08-09; retrieved 2011-06-07

Persondata
Name	Bellatin, Mario
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	July 23, 1960
Place of birth	Mexico City, Mexico
Date of death
Place of death