Awards
She was nominated for the coveted Villarrutia Award in 1970s, but refused it saying to the Mexican president, "Who is going to award a prize to those who fell at Tlatelolco in 1968?"
In 1979, she was the first woman to win Mexico’s Premio Nacional de Periodismo (National Journalism Prize) for her contributions to the dissemination of Mexican cultural and political expression.
In 2000, the nations of Colombia and Chile each awarded Poniatowska with their highest writing awards.
In 2001, she received the José Fuentes Mares National Prize for Literature in 2001 as well as the annual prize from Spanish book publisher Alfaguara for La piel del cielo (Heaven’s Skin) .
The International Women's Media Foundation gave her the Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006 in recognition of her work.
She won the Rómulo Gallegos Prize in 2007 with El Tren pasa primero (The train passes first) . In the same year, she received the Premio Iberoamericano from the government of Mexico City.
She has received honorary doctorates from UNAM (2001), the Universidad Autónoma de Sinaloa (1979) the New School of Social Research in NY (1994), the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (2000) and the University of Puerto Rico (2010) .
Other awards include the Biblioteca Breva for the novel Leonora, the Mazatlán prize for Hasta no verte Jesús mío awards from the Club de Periodistas, the Manuel Buendia journalism prize, and the Radio UNAM prize for her book of interviews with Mexican authors entitled Palabras Cruzadas ("Crossed Words"). She was selected to receive Mexico’s National Literary Prize, but the denied it, insisting that it should go to Elena Garro, but neither woman ultimately received it.
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