Guillermo Arriaga (Mexico City, 1958) is one of the few authors to win the highest awards in both film and literature. He won the Best Writer Award at the Cannes Film Festival for The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada and in 2020 won the Alfaguara Novel Prize for Salvar el fuego. He has published the novels Guillotine Squad, A Sweet Scent of Death, The Night Buffalo, and El Salvaje (2016), winner of the 2017 Mazatlán Literature Prize. In 2021, Alfaguara published a new edition of his collection of short stories, Retorno 201. He is the writer behind the films Amores perros, 21 Grams, and Babel, for which he was nominated for an Oscar. In 2008, he presented The Burning Plain, his directorial debut, starring Charlize Theron, Kim Basinger, Jennifer Lawrence and José María Yazpik. He produced and co-wrote the story From Afar, the first Ibero-American film to win the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. His literary work has been translated into twenty-two languages, and he was chosen by an international panel as one of the hundred best writers in the history of cinema.
Photo: © Ana Paula Álvarez