Daniel Sada

In 2008, he won the prestigious Herralde Prize for his novel Almost Never. He also won the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize in 1992 and the Jose Fuentes Mares National Literature Prize in 1999. His works have been translated into English, German, French, Dutch, Bulgarian, and Portuguese. In 2011, he was awarded Mexico's prestigious National Prize for Arts and Sciences in the Literature category. Just hours after being presented the prize, Sada died at age 58 from a years-long struggle with kidney disease.

Daniel Sada (February 25, 1953 Mexicali, Baja California – November 18, 2011 Mexico City) was a Mexican poet, journalist, and writer, whose work has been hailed as one of the most important contributions to the Spanish language. He organized many poetry workshops in Mexico City and several other cities. He was granted a scholarship by the INBA and FONCA and, since 1994, he was member of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte.

Sada was born in Mexicali in 1953. He studied journalism and Spanish literature in Sacramento, Coahuila devouring the works of Dante and Ovid. He has described his early influences and his first contacts with literature and the metric structures he admired: "I have a deep knowledge, from childhood, of the most elemental constructions of these metric forms, so characteristic of Spanish. In my primary school in Sacramento, Coahuila, Panchita Cabrera, a rural schoolteacher who was an ardent fan of the Spanish Golden Age (a type that no longer exists) taught us these phonetic techniques with one goal in mind: that we might fine-tune our ears in order to appreciate the expressive delicacy and virulence of our language". He was a professor at the Autonomous University of Zacatecas, The Hispanic Academy of San Miguel de Allende, and the Carlos Setién Garcia School of Journalism.