Jos� Emilio Pacheco was born in Mexico City, Mexico on June 30, 1939. He was a poet, novelist, journalist, essayist and literary critic. His first collection of short stories was published in 1958. He was best known for his accounts of adolescents growing up in a less crowded, but corrupt and unjust Mexico in the 1940s and 1950s. This is exhibited in the 1982 novel Las Batallas en el Desierto (Battles in the Desert). In 2009, he won the Cervantes Prize. He also translated works by Samuel Beckett, Tennessee Williams and T.S. Eliot and taught literature at universities in the United States, Great Britain and Canada. He died after suffering a heart attack on January 26, 2014 at the age of 74.