Alberto Ruy Sanchez is a Mexican writer who likes to talk. He answers questions without being asked. And he is the only 57 year old I've met who can dance and dance with the greatest of joy and energy. When he tells the story of the goats on the trees and how the city of Mogador is a metaphor for a woman - mysterious and incomprehensible and yet infinitely desirable - one is lost in the richness of his narrative and the timbre of his voice and begs for more.
Listening to him at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival is almost a sensual experience. He caresses with his voice and teases with his laughs. To reach the port of Mogador, he says, one must turn the engine of the boat off and let the current take you to shore. So is the way to enter a woman. The man must switch his engine off and follow the flow. He seems to speak from experience for the women who make up the majority of the listeners at his talk seem only too willing to allow him to invade their private space with the charm and warmth of his presence, hanging at his every word as if each is a lover's gift. Indeed Alberto is the perennial lover, beginning and ending every encounter with kisses and looks as if he will surrender himself at your feet. And you play along with him because he is a writer, a poet, an artist and you want to be part of his narrative and the fabric of his imagination. 'You shine like a star in my sky' he wrote on his book Mogador I gave him to autograph. It becomes my bedtime companion...
Alberto Ruy Sánchez (1951) is a fiction and non fiction writer, poet and essayist from Mexico City. He received his Ph.D. in 1980 from the University of Jussieu, Paris under the directorship of Roland Barthes.
His novels include: Los nombres del aire (1987, Premio Xavier Villaurrutia), Los demonios de la lengua (1987), En los labios del agua (1996, recipient of the Prix des Trois Continents for its French translation by Gabriel Iaculli); and Los jardines secretos de Mogador: Voces de tierra (2001, Premio Cálamo la Otra Mirada). His most recent publications include, Limulus. Visiones del fósil viviente/Visions of the Living Fossil (2004, co-authored with the artist Brian Nissen and translated by Rhonda Dahl Buchanan) and Nueve veces el asombro (2005). He has published widely in scholarly journals and is the author of several books of literary criticism, including Una introducción a Octavio Paz (1990, recipient of the Premio José Fuentes Mares). Since 1988 he has served as the editor-in-chief of Artes de México, which has won more than one hundred national and international editorial awards. In 2000 he was proclaimed Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government, and in 2005 he received the honor of Gran Orden de Honor Nacional al Mérito Autoral in Mexico City. He is also an Honorary Citizen of Louisville, Kentucky, an Honorable Kentucky Colonel, and an Honorary Captain of the majestic steamship, the Belle of Louisville. In addition, he has served as a Visiting Tinker Scholar at Stanford University and as the Chairman of Creative Non-Fiction Program at the Banff Centre for the Arts. Visit www.albertoruysanchez.com for more information about the author and his works.
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