La Jornada: The poet Vicente Quirarte has died

The poet, narrator, essayist, playwright and chronicler Vicente Quirarte Castañeda, considered a key figure in contemporary Mexican literature, died yesterday in Mexico City at the age of 72.

The news was spread, without further details, by his family on social networks and confirmed by El Colegio Nacional, an institution of which he had been a member since 2016, which in a statement regretted his departure and highlighted that he leaves “a monumental legacy in Mexican and Ibero-American letters.”

The current president of that academic body, the archaeologist Leonardo López Luján, highlighted the figure of Quirarte not only as a writer, but as a “committed professor and official of our highest house of studies,” in reference to the UNAM, and assured that “his death leaves an irreplaceable place, but we are sure that his work and his memory will be among us.”

The UNAM, through its Cultural Diffusion Coordination, recalled in a publication that the life and work of the renowned intellectual “was closely linked” to that institution of higher education, “from where he built bridges between the history of Mexican literature and the new generations.”

He also recognized that “in his writing, unclassifiable due to its breadth, the territories of Mexican poetry, history, travel, fantastic literature and a Mexico City traveled with curiosity, memory and affection coexisted.”

Meanwhile, the Mexican Academy of Language, of which he was a full member since 2003, announced that it will pay him a posthumous tribute today at 1:00 p.m. with an honor guard at the J. García López Casa Pedregal wakes, the site where the funeral takes place.

Born on July 19, 1954 into a family that breathed history – his father, Martín Quirarte, was a renowned historian – Vicente Quirarte forged a career that challenged genres and the boundaries of knowledge.

He completed his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the UNAM, a university where he taught since 1987 and to which he dedicated a large part of his academic and administrative life, serving as general director of Publications, director of the Bibliographic Research Institute and member of its Governing Board.

His literary career, which began in 1979 with the collection of poems Theater about the beloved wind –deserving of the UNAM Punto de Partida award–, was prolific and widely awarded.

Among others, he won the Francisco González León National Prize for Young Poetry of Mexico for Defeat whiteness (1982); the José Revueltas National Literary Essay Award for The quicksilver and the pomegranate: Gilberto Owen in his love speech (1990), and the Xavier Villaurrutia Award for The angel is a vampire (1991).

In 2011 he received the Ramón López Velarde Ibero-American Poetry Prize and in 2012 the National University Prize in the area of ​​Artistic Creation and Extension of Culture. In 2024, he was awarded the National Prize for Arts and Literature, in the category of Linguistics and Literature, the highest recognition that the Mexican government provides to its creators.

Fascination with dark territories

The work of Vicente Quirarte cannot be understood without his fascination with the dark territories of existence and family history, as he told this newspaper in two interviews, spanning a dozen years. The first, in 2013, on the occasion of the appearance of The invinciblea work that he defined at that time as his “literary testament.” The other, in July 2025, regarding the delivery of the aforementioned National Prize for Arts and Literature.

For him, literature was an exercise in introspection and an antidote to emptiness. He assumed it as an expression that removed the fear of living and dying, “because it makes you live with more intensity and makes you understand that writing is an alternative way of living and understanding reality,” he declared in 2013.

This constant search led him to explore genres as dissimilar as poetry, essay and theater, always with tense prose, inherited from his teachers Ramón López Velarde and Rubén Bonifaz Nuño, as well as from his literary obsessions: the vampire, the monster, the gothic, the work of HP Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe.

However, above all he recognized himself as a poet and agreed with what Xavier Villaurrutia said at the time: “it doesn’t matter that a poet plays several instruments: they are all like a mask, they all address a common ground which is poetry.”

With a literary production that includes more than 20 poetry titles and thirty books of essays, another of the great themes of his work was Mexico City. His pen was a scalpel to dissect the city, its streets, its ghosts and its history, making it a central character in his vast work.

Vicente Quirarte was a writer, a teacher, a researcher, an academic and a person in charge of institutions in permanent search. He liked challenges and hated conformity. Hence his conviction that “happiness is a term that only the superficial and mediocre accept.”