Translation Rights TQE / Authors / Mendoza, Élmer

Élmer Mendoza was born in Culiacán (México) in 1949. He is a professor at the Autonomous University of Sinaloa. He coordinates seven groups of starting novelists throughout Mexico. From 1978 to 1995, he published five volumes of short stories and two of chronicles, and in 1999, his first novel, Un asesino solitario (A Lonely Killer), which immediately situated him, according to the Mexican literary critic Federico Campbell, as “the first narrator who manages a true account of the effects of drug trafficking in our country”. El amante de Janis Joplin (The Lover of Janis Joplin) was awarded the XVII José Fuentes Mares National Literary Prize and Efecto Tequila (Tequila Effect) was a finalist, in 2005, to the Dashiell Hammett Prize. In 2006, his fourth novel, Cóbraselo caro (Make It Expensive) was published. Arturo Pérez-Reverte has said about Mendoza, “He is my friend and my teacher. The Queen of the South was born from the taverns, the narcocorrido music and his novels.”