Sergio Pitol

Sergio Pitol Deméneghi (1933–2018) was a Mexican novelist, essayist, translator and diplomat. Born in Puebla to a family of Italian descent, he was raised largely in Veracruz after his mother's early death.

He studied law and literature at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México before beginning a decades-long career as a cultural attaché and ambassador, serving in Poland, Hungary, Italy, China and elsewhere.

Alongside his own fiction — including the novels El desfile del amor and Domar a la divina garza, and the genre-blurring "Trilogy of Memory" (El arte de la fuga, El viaje, El mago de Viena) — he was a prolific translator into Spanish of writers such as Jane Austen, Henry James, Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov.

He won Mexico's Premio Juan Rulfo in 1999 and the Premio Cervantes, the Spanish-speaking world's most prestigious literary award, in 2005. He settled in Xalapa in 1993, where he taught at the Universidad Veracruzana until his death in 2018.