Biography
José Manuel Prieto was born in Havana, Cuba. He earned his PhD in History in Universidad
Autónoma de México and has taught at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económica,
México City, from 1994 to the present. Currently he is the Margaret and Herman Sokol Fellow
at The Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers in The New York Public
Library. Prieto has been the recipient of fellowships, grants and awards from Sistema Nacional
de Creadores, México, Jan. 2003-2005 the Santa Madalena Foundation, April del 2001, Florencia
and John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2002)
A novelist, José Manuel Prieto is the author of several novels, non fiction books,
articles an essays, and also a translator from Russian Literature to Spanish. His books are
Livadia, (novel), Mondadori, Barcelona, 1998,
Enciclopedia de una vida en Rusia, (novel),
Mondadori, Barcelona, 2003, El Tartamudo y la rusa (short stories),
Tusquets, México 2002 Treinta días en Moscú, (travel account),
Mondadori,Barcelona. 2001, , and others.
Livadia has been translated in to more than seven languages.
Under the title of Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire
it was published in the United State by Grove Press,
in France as Papillons de nuit dans l´empire de Russie,
in Italy as Le Farfalle Notturne dell´Impero Russo.
It received an exceptionally good critical
reception in such publications as The New York Times, The New York Review of Books,
Le Monde, Liberation,and The Times Literary Supplement.
At the end of 2004 the prestigious Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung included
Liwadjia as
one of that year’s most important books of fiction in Germany.
In 2003 José Manuel Prieto participated in the 3erd Internacional Literatur Festival of Berlin, 2003 That same year he participated in a PEN AMERICAN CENTER tribute to the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez along with writers such as Paul Auster, William Kennedy and Rose Styron. From April 16th to 22nd he was one of the participants of the New York Festival of International Literature, Pen World Voices, a conversation of writers as Margaret Atwood, Bej Dao, Vacla Havel and Wole Soyinka, among others.
