María Luisa Puga

Puga was born in Mexico City. She and her siblings went to live with her grandmother in Acapulco when she was 9 years old, after the death of their mother. After her father’s second marriage, they moved to Mazatlán. When she was 24 years old, she traveled to both Europe and Africa (Nairobi, Kenya). After about a decade in Europe, María Luisa Puga returned to Mexico and published her first novel, Las Posibilidades del Odio (The Possibilities of Hate), in 1978. There was a lot of critical attention about her first novel because of the comparison she made of Kenya’s seventy-year struggle for a better future with the situation in Mexico.

Many critics remark that Puga’s work is simple storytelling; the simplicity of her writing is what gives it its charm. Common themes in Puga’s work include the socio-psychological makeup of the individual and history. She is said to examine the social situation in Mexico from the late 1960s to the present day by telling her own personal story. Political and social situations are reflected by how they affect the protagonists in the stories she writes.

The last years of her life she lived in Zirahuén, Michoacán, Mexico. She was a coordinator of literary workshops around Mexico. María Luisa Puga died on December 25, 2004, in Mexico City. Her unpublished diaries, where Puga touched upon many facets of her literary and personal life, were donated to the University of Texas at Austin's Benson Latin American Collection by her sister Patricia in January 2017. See http://www.lib.utexas.edu/taro/utlac/00471/lac-00471.html for more details.

• Bradu, Fabienne: Señas particulares: Escritoras (Ensayos sobre escritoras mexicanas del siglo XX). México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1987, 118-135. ISBN 968-16-2689-3 (Spanish)
• De Beer, Gabriella. Contemporary Mexican Women Writers: Five Voices. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996, 11-57. ISBN 0-292-71586-2
• López, Irma M.: Historia, escritura e identidad: la novelística de Maria Luisa Puga. New York / Vienna [etc.]: Peter Lang, 1996. (Wor(l)ds of change ; 23) ISBN 0-8204-3052-8 (Spanish)
• Pfeiffer, Erna: EntreVistas. Diez escritoras mexicanas desde bastidores. Frankfurt a.M.: Vervuert Verlag, 1992, 123-135. ISBN 3-89354-051-2 (Spanish)

Beer, Gabriella de (1996). Contemporary Mexican Women Writers. University of Texas Press: Austin. ISBN 0-292-71586-2

• Webpage of CONACULTA - INBA about María Luisa Puga as Author of the Month (Spanish)
• María Luisa Puga Papers, Benson Latin American Collection, UT Austin
• María Luisa Puga: A Life in Diaries