Who is Edmundo Valadés?

Mexican writer, journalist, editor, and great intellectual of the 20th century, Edmundo Valadés was born in Guaymas, Sonora, on February 22, 1915. Fond of the short story as a genre, he supports its diffusion and promotes its writing through meetings, literary workshops, and a magazine.

Who is Edmundo Valadés?
Writer and cultural journalist Edmundo Valadés, one of Mexico's great storytellers. Photo: Cultura

Writer, journalist, editor, and great Mexican intellectual of the 20th century, Edmundo Valadés was born in Guaymas Sonora on February 22, 1915. In love with the short story as a genre, he supports its diffusion and promotes its writing through meetings, literary workshops, and the founding of the magazine El Cuento.

Edmundo Valadés is one of the greatest connoisseurs of the short story in Mexico and its maximum disseminator; he represents one of the figures that all literary tradition can use as an example. He is the author of a classic work La muerte tiene permiso ("Death has permission", 1955), which establishes an aesthetic and literary moment where it is no longer operative to separate rural and urban stories to define Mexican literature.

As an author, he prefers the surprise ending, the closed story, and the use of words and inflections of popular speech that broadens the expressive possibilities of many narrators who succeeded him.

Edmundo Valadés founded the magazine El Cuento in 1939, published five issues, and in 1964 began its second stage in which 150 issues of the best of universal and particularly Latin American short stories were published; he directed it until his death. In 1981 the magazine received the National Journalism Award in the category of Cultural Dissemination.

His work as a journalist is recorded in columns, reports, and publications such as Excepta, cultural supplements of the newspapers Novedades and El Nacional, as well as the magazines América and Cuadernos Americanos.

Edmundo Valadés is the author of La Revolución y las letras ("The Revolution and Literature") in co-authorship with Luis Leal, Por los caminos de Proust, El libro de la imaginación, Las dualidades funestas, Las raíces irritadas and Sólo los sueños y los deseos son inmortales, Palomita.

He received several awards and recognitions, among them the National Journalism Award in 1981; the Rosario Castellanos Award from the Journalists Club of Mexico in 1982; the Narrators Encounter in Morelia in 1985; the National Autonomous University of Mexico honored him in 1987, the University of Sonora awarded him a Doctorate Honoris Causa and in 1989, the International Book Fair of Guadalajara was dedicated to him.

"Man needs to tell what he believes, dreams or sees, because for millennia we have had the same yearning to capture in a lasting testimony the reality or the dream that surrounds us." - Edmundo Valadés' famous phrase.
Edmundo Valadés
Edmundo Valadés. Image: Encyclopedia of Literature in Mexico

Thanks to the edition of the magazine El Cuento and his extensive career as an anthologist of the genre, Edmundo Valadés builds bridges between the literature of Mexico and universal literature, and collaborates in the formation of a reading public of short stories and reaffirms the importance of one of the genres in which Mexico stands out within the Hispanic tradition.

Edmundo Valadés died in Mexico City at the age of 79 on November 30, 1994. Currently, the Government of the State of Puebla through the Ministry of Culture convenes the Latin American Short Story Contest Edmundo Valadés.