Jorge Ibargüengoitia Antillón (January 22, 1928 – November 27, 1983) was a Mexican novelist and playwright who achieved great popular and critical success with his satires, three of which have appeared in English: The Dead Girls, Two Crimes, and The Lightning of August.
This meeting caused such an impression on Ibargüengoitia that he decided to return to Mexico City and enrol at the Faculty of Philosophy at UNAM,[3][6] where he graduated with a specialization in Dramatic Arts.
[5] His already debilitated link to the theatre due to the lack of success with his plays got further damaged in the beginning of the 1960s when Rodolfo Usigli was asked in an interview by Elena Poniatowska to name his favourite students and he did not mention Ibargüengoitia.
The novel won the Casa de las Américas Prize, and in it, the style that would characterise most of his further work was already present: taking real-life stories and subjecting them to a whimsical, sardonic treatment.
Maten al león (1969), although set on an imaginary island, is a novel mirroring the Latin American dictatorships; its details are comic but the end is dark.
Estas ruinas que ves (1975) is a farce based on realistic details of academic life that are still visible in early 21st century Guanajuato: the clanging of church bells disconcerting a speaker, cutting the ribbon at museum openings, the set of cultural movers and shakers who have known each other since kindergarten.
For Las Muertas (1977) he turned to the most outrageous criminals of his native state: the brothel-keepers Delfina and María de Jesús González, whose decade-long careers as serial killers emerged in 1964.
Dos crímenes (1979) is a novel about a man who is being prosecuted by the police and runs away to hide in his rich uncle's house, where intrigue, suspicions and relationships unravel among he and his family members.
His last novel, Los pasos de López, was published in 1982 and it is a fictional memoir whose characters are based on Miguel Hidalgo and the members of the Querétaro conspiracy of 1810.
[6] Ibargüengoitia was also known for his weekly columns in the Mexico City newspaper Excelsior, and later on in the magazines Vuelta and Proceso,[5] which have been collected in a half dozen paperback volumes.
[4] He is considered one of the first writers who "demystified the contents of the history of Mexico" and humanised its heroic figures,[6] through his use of irony, farce, humour and even grotesque depictions.
His native state of Guanajuato was also frequently used as a set for his stories, although he almost always used fictional names, such as Cuévano, Plan de Abajo, Muérdago or Pedrones, to stand in for it or its cities.
[6] Even though he had initially declined to attend, he changed his mind at the last minute[14] and boarded Avianca Flight 011 that departed from Paris and was due to land in Madrid.