Christopher Domínguez Michael (Mexico City, 1962) is a Hispanic-American literary critic who holds a significant place in Mexican literature. An essayist, historian, and biographer, he is the author of, among other works,*Tiros en el concierto*. Literatura mexicana del siglo V (1997 and 2024), Vida de fray Servando (Xavier Villaurrutia Prize 2004), reissued in 2022, La sabiduría sin promesa. Vida y letras del siglo XX (International Prize of the Chilean Critics’ Circle, 2009), Para entender a Jorge Luis Borges (2010), Critical Dictionary of Mexican Literature (2005), The Nineteenth-Century Writers (2012), and Octavio Paz in His Century, published in France (Gallimard, 2014) before appearing in Mexico, Spain, and Argentina.
William Pescador, his only novel, was published in 1997 and will soon be reissued by Penguin Random House. He is the author of over two thousand articles, essays, and reviews published in the Mexican newspapers Reforma and El Universal, where he currently writes, as well as in numerous literary journals and cultural supplements abroad.
His most recent works areLa innovación retrógrada. Literatura mexicana (1805–1863) (2016), Retrato, personaje y fantasma (2017), Historia mínima de la literatura mexicana del siglo XIX (2019), Maiacovski punk y otras figuras del siglo XXI (Taurus, 2022), and El crítico sin estatua (2025). His work has been translated into English, French, Portuguese, Italian, and Chinese.
He has received Guggenheim, Tinker, and O’Gorman fellowships, and has been a visiting professor at the Sorbonne as well as at the universities of Chicago and New York. He has served as an editor at the Fondo de Cultura Económica, a member of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores, and a research associate at El Colegio de México. Since 1999, he has been an editorial advisor for Letras Libres and has lived in Coyoacán for nearly half a century.
On November 3, 2017, he was inducted into El Colegio Nacional. This institution, which brings together Mexico’s most eminent humanists and scientists, is currently publishing, in installments, his Ensayos reunidos (Collected Essays).
Photo credit: Céline Ramos