Son of Jorge Enrigue, a Jalisco lawyer and Maria Luisa Soler, a chemist and a refugee from Barcelona, he is the youngest of four brothers. Shortly after his birth, the family moved to Mexico City due to his father's work. He studied a degree in Journalism at the Universidad Iberoamericana, where he later worked as a literature professor. Young, he began his career as an editor and columnist in various cultural magazines, including Vuelta, founded and directed by Octavio Paz, and later Letras Libres. Later, he was editor at the Fondo de Cultura Económica and at the Secretariat of Culture.
Career
In 1996, at the age of 27, Enrigue was awarded the prestigious Joaquín Mortiz Prize for his first novel, La muerte de un instalador. Since then it has been reprinted five times, and in 2012 it was selected as one of the key novels of the Mexican 20th century, and anthologized by Mexico's largest publishing house, Fondo de Cultura Económica. His books Vidas perpendiculares and Hipotermia have also been widely acclaimed. Both novels have been published by Gallimard. Hypothermia, which offers an "unflinching gaze towards 21st-century life and the immigrant experience", was published in 2013 in the United States and England by Dalkey Archive Press in a translation by Brendan Riley. His 2011 novel, Decencia, received praises in Latin America's and Spain's most relevant publications. In 2007, he was selected as one of the most influential contemporary writers in Spanish by the Hay Festival's Bogotá39. In 2009, he was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation Residence Fellowship at the Bellagio Centre to finish the manuscript of his last novel, Decencia. In 2011 he became a fellow at the Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars of the New York Public Library, where he began working on his fifth novel. On November 4, 2013, Enrigue's novel Muerte súbita was announced as the winner of the 31st Herralde Novel Prize, joining a distinguished list of works by authors from Spain and Latin America, including Sergio Pitol, Enrique Vila-Matas, Álvaro Pombo, Javier Marías, Juan Villoro, and Roberto Bolaño. Along with his work as a writer, he has worked as a professor of creative writing at several universities in the United States, such as Columbia, Princeton, and Maryland; also studying a PhD in Latin American Literature in the latter one. His work has been translated into multiple languages, including English, German, French, Czech, and Chinese.
