Guillermo Humberto Sheridan Prieto is a Mexicanliterary critic, scholar and public commentator.
Life and work
Sheridan was a Chevening Scholar at the University of East Anglia in 1986. He was awarded a doctorate in Mexican literature by the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He is a member of Mexico's Sistema Nacional de Investigadores, a governmental agency established in Mexico in 1984, to promote both the quantity and quality of research. As a scholar, most of his writing deals with the history of Mexican modern poetry in books like Los Contemporáneos ayer, Un corazón adicto, México en 1932, Poeta con Paisaje, Tres ensayos sobre Gilberto Owen, Paralelos y meridianos, Señales debidas and Malas palabras. Jorge Cuesta y la revista Examen. His latest book, Habitación con retratos is the second volume of a thrilogy about Octavio Paz's life and work. Sheridan has also edited works by poets like José Juan Tablada, Ramón López Velarde and José Gorostiza. Sheridan has written extensively about politics, education and everyday life in some of Mexico's most prestigious newspapers, such as Reforma and La Jornada. He was a monthly collaborator to Octavio Paz's review Vuelta, and continues to publish a monthly article in Enrique Krauze’s Letras Libres and a weekly commentary in El Universal, a major daily newspaper. Several volumes of his chronicles have been published over the years: Frontera norte, Cartas de Copilco y otras postales, Lugar a dudas, El encarguito and Viaje al centro de mi tierra. His writings about the problems of higher education in Mexico were collected in Allá en el campus grande. In 1996 he published an infamous satyrical novel about Mexican politics, El dedo de oro . He has a blog called "El Minutario", hosted by Letras Libres. Sheridan has also written about Mexican art. The book Manuel Alvarez Bravo: Eyes in His Eyes, a collection of inedit photographs, published by D.A.P. in 2007, has a text written by Sheridan. He has been a longtime collaborator of film directorNicolás Echevarría, with whom he wrote the script for Cabeza de Vaca and several documentaries about Mexican indigenous cultures. A full-time professor and researcher at the NationalAutonomous University of Mexico, Sheridan has been a visiting scholar at the University of Aberdeen, in Scotland; at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in France; at Boston University and at the University of Texas in Austin. In 1989 he was awarded the Xavier Villaurrutia Award, a literary national prize. In 2011 he received the "Fernando Benítez Cultural Journalism" national award by the Guadalajara International Book Fair. In 2014 he received the "Ramón López Velarde Prize", a national literary award. In 2019 he received the "Jorge Ibargüengoitia Prize", a national literary award.
