Vicente Quirarte, a Mexican writer and literary scholar whose work connected poetry with research on Mexican literary history and Mexico City, died in Mexico City on Aug. 11, 2026, El Colegio Nacional said. He was 72.
His literary career began in 1979 with a poetry collection that won the Punto de Partida prize at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). In 1990, he founded the poetry collection El Ala del Tigre at UNAM to publish established and emerging Mexican poets.
His 1991 collection El ángel es vampiro won the Xavier Villaurrutia literary prize. He used 19th- and 20th-century newspapers and magazines to research Mexican literary history, producing editions with scholarly notes and context and studies of writers including Guillermo Prieto and Carlos Pellicer. His 2001 book Elogio de la calle: Biografía literaria de la Ciudad de México 1850–1992 traced the life of Mexico City through literary writing, treating the capital as a literary character. In 2016, he entered El Colegio Nacional and delivered the institution’s inaugural lecture, “El laurel invisible.”
In 2020, UNAM relaunched El Ala del Tigre, the poetry collection he founded, expanding its range to include poetry in Spanish and Indigenous languages. In 2024, he received Mexico’s National Prize for Arts and Literature in Linguistics and Literature.
