Carlos Fuentes, Mexico’s most celebrated novelist and critic, was born in 1928. He spent his early years in Washington D.C., where his father was a member of the diplomatic corps, and as a teen lived in Argentina and Chile, as well as his native Mexico. He studied law at the School of Law, National University of Mexico and at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Internacionales, Geneva.

Fifteen novels by Mr. Fuentes have been published in the United States: The Death of Artemio Cruz; The Good Conscience; Where the Air is Clear; A Change of Skin; Aura; Terra Nostra; The Hydra Head; Distant Relations; The Old Gringo, a national bestseller in 1985, which was also made into a movie; Christopher Unborn, a national bestseller in 1989; The Campaign in 1991; Diana: The Goddess Who Hunts Alone in 1995; The Crystal Frontier in 1997; The Years With Laura Diaz, 2000; and Inez in 2002. His latest book is, In This I Believe, a personal reflection on subjects from A to Z. The next book to be published in the U.S. will be the political novel, The Eagle’s Throne.

Among Mr. Fuentes’s other works, Burnt Water, a collection of short stories, appeared in 1980; Myself With Others: Selected Essays in 1988; Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins, in 1990; The Orange Tree, 1994; and, in 1996, A New Time for Mexico, a work of political commentary.

Mr. Fuentes helped to produce and narrate a television series on the history of Spanish culture, “The Buried Mirror,” which was also published as an illustrated book in 1992.

In 1978, Mr. Fuentes was awarded the Romulo Gallegos Prize in Caracas, Venezuela. He was the third writer to receive the award; earlier winners were Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He was honored with the National Prize in Literature, Mexico’s highest literary award in 1984. In 1988, he received the Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the most prestigious award bestowed on a Spanish-language writer, conferred by King Juan Carlos of Spain. In 1999 he received the inaugural Latin Civilization Award bestowed by the French Academy and the Brazilian Academy in honor of the person who has done the most to promote the Latin civilization. He also was the recipient of France’s Legion of Honor, Italy’s Cavour Award, the Principe de Asturias Award of Spain and The Order of the Southern Cross of Brazil, as well as the Commonwealth Award (Delaware, 2002) and the Galileo Prize (Florence, 2005).

Mr. Fuentes writes for many European magazines, and his work has appeared in The Nation, Vanity Fair, The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times Book Review and The Washington Post Book World. He is a columnist for the daily newspaper, Reforma, in Mexico City.

Mexico's ambassador to France in 1975-77, Mr. Fuentes was the Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge, England, in 1986-87 and inaugurated the Robert F. Kennedy Chair in Latin American Studies at Harvard in 1988. In the summer of 1992, the University of Madrid devoted an entire week to a study of his work. He has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, El Colegio Nacional in Mexico, and, most recently, at Princeton, Dartmouth, Washington University, Harvard, Cornell and Brown, where he is professor at large.

He has been awarded honorary degrees at Harvard University, Washington University in St. Louis, Columbia College (Chicago, Illinois), Chicago State University, Cambridge University, Dartmouth College, Bard College, the New School, Georgetown University, Essex University, Wesleyan University, the University of Salamanca in Spain and the Free University of Berlin. He has been commencement speaker at Harvard and Wesleyan.

He is a member of the Colegio Nacional de Mexico, a Trustee of the New York Public Library where he was inducted as a Library Lion, a member of the Board of the Institute of National Strategy (Los Angeles) and a foreign member of the Board of the Academy of Art & Letters. He has also been a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and a Fellow of the Humanities at the council for the Humanities at Princeton University. He is Founder of the Iberoamerican Forum, which brings together political, literary and business personalities of the Spanish and Portuguese speaking worlds once a year. He has been a member of the juries of Prix Seguier in Paris, of the Aigle d’Or at the Nice Book Fair and of the Queen Sofia of Spain Prize in Literature in Spain, as well as the Venice and Cannes film festivals.

Mr. Fuentes currently divides his times between Mexico City and London, and lectures regularly in the United States. He is married to the Mexican journalist Sylvia Lemus by whom he has two children, Carlos Rafael (deceased) and Natasha.