Alberto Ruy Sánchez

Since 1988 he has been the chief editor and founding publisher of Latin America's leading arts magazine, Artes de México. He has been a visiting professor at several universities including Stanford, Middlebury and La Sorbonne, and has been invited to give lectures in Europe, Africa, Asia, North America and South America. His work has been praised by Octavio Paz, Juan Rulfo, Severo Sarduy, Alberto Manguel and Claude Michel Cluny and has received awards from several international institutions.

Alberto Ruy Sánchez studied at Paris-Sorbonne University - Paris IV and Ibero-American University. The recorded working language is Spanish, French and English. Employment is recorded with Stanford University, Artes de Mexico and Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Distinctions recorded are Officer of Arts and Letters, Guggenheim Fellowship, Xavier Villaurrutia Award and Premio Mazatlán de Literatura.

Ruy-Sánchez's parents, Joaquín Ruy-Sánchez and María Antonieta Lacy, were both born in the northern Mexican state of Sonora. Alberto was the first of five children. For a few years, the family spent almost half the year in Mexico City and the other half in northern Mexico. These relocations included long residence periods in Ciudad Obregón, Sonora and Villa Constitución in the Sonoran desert of Baja California, where Ruy-Sánchez lived from ages three to five. This experience gave him a unique early experience of the desert.

Ruy-Sánchez had forgotten his early childhood experiences until he suddenly recalled them in 1975, visiting the Sahara for the first time. From that involuntary sudden recollection he developed a special creative relationship with the Moroccan desert, especially the walled city of Essaouira (the ancient Mogador), which became a principal setting for most of his novels. As he explains in his essay, "The nine gifts that Morocco gave me": Alberto Ruy-Sánchez

Before travelling to Morocco for the first time as a teenager, and later returning as a college student, Ruy-Sánchez received a severe humanistic education from Jesuit schools in Mexico. From these experiences he gained "a Baroque idea of the world as a complex reality that can only be fully understood and enjoyed with all the senses." The baroque aim of "listening with the eyes, looking with the fingers and the ears, tasting with the smell, etc, as an artistic principle" is a common theme in his poetry and prose. Ruy-Sánchez's large Sonoran family finally fully emigrated to Mexico City and held weekly meetings where Ruy-Sánchez learned "the big pleasure of hearing and telling stories, and it was there that I felt growing inside me the desire of being a writer." This desire was confirmed when he visited the Djemaa el Fna square in Marrakech in 1975 and 1976, where traditional storytellers are responsible for the square's designation as an UNESCO Oral Human Heritage Site in June 1997.

The theme of the search in Ruy-Sánchez's novels also has its roots in his own life. Specifically, he uses his novels as a means to search for knowledge in the senses of investigating life's mysteries and going beyond observed material reality. Ruy-Sánchez began writing seeking to understand women's desire, through the stories women told him those he witnessed. This first search led to the novel Mogador, the names of the air. This became a series that included En los labios del agua, Los Jardines secretos de Mogador, and Nueve veces el asombro. The full series took almost twenty years to write, as each published novel generated many letters in response, mostly from women telling their own stories of desire. Sánchez would consider those stories, alter them, and create another book, following this ongoing theme of search. Ruy-Sánchez had a number of jobs while living in Paris, but in between he became a tantra student, a tantra instructor, and worked for a sexual therapist. This exploration of tantra contributed to the search through writing both in the sense of literally searching for women's desire and in a more spiritual or religious sense of seeking transcendent experiences. Ruy-Sánchez describes in a statement essay his books as "material objects, geometrical compositions, that could help people think, feel, understand and improve their lives".

Ruy-Sánchez's books have been translated into several languages – mainly French, but also Portuguese, Italian, German, Arabic, Serbian and Turkish. Only one of his books has been published in English, however. They remain in print in Spanish as cult favorites, unusual for poetry. His first work came out in 1987, when he was awarded the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize, the most prestigious literary recognition in Mexico. The University of New Mexico awarded him as Literary Essayist in 1991 and he was also a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In February 2000 he was decorated by the French Government as Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. The Governor of Kentucky awarded him as "Kentucky Colonel", the highest distinction given in that state, where he also is Honnorary Citizen of Louisville. Between 1999 and 2003 he was appointed Chairman of the Creative Non-Fiction Summer Program at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada. In November 2006 The Editor's Guild of Mexico awarded him with the Premio Juan Pablos al Mérito Editorial, a lifetime achievement recognition for 26 years of working as an editor and mainly for his work in creating the publishing house Artes de México, a leading cultural project in the Americas. Ruy-Sánchez currently lives in Mexico City with his wife, historian Margarita De Orellana, coeditor of Artes de México, and their children Andrea (born 1984) and Santiago (born 1987). He continues to speak internationally and travel within Mexico as a researcher of diverse Mexican cultures.

Alberto Ruy Sánchez is recorded as having received Officer of Arts and Letters, Guggenheim Fellowship and Xavier Villaurrutia Award. Identity and origins. His recorded languages were Spanish, French, English and Italian. He married Margarita de Orellana.