Martha Batiz

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Martha Batiz Zuk is a Mexican writer, who was born and raised in Mexico City, but has been living in Toronto since 2003. She started publishing in 1993 at age 22.

1 Writing career
2 Education
3 See also
4 References

[edit] Writing career

By age 25 she had been awarded the most prestigious Creative Writing scholarships available in Mexico: from the Mexico’s Institute of Fine Arts (1993-94); from the former Mexican Writers’ Centre (Centro Mexicano de Escritores in 1994-95) where famous writers like Carlos Fuentes, Rosario Castellanos, Homero Aridjis, among many others also received scholarships at the beginning of their careers; and Young Creators from the National Fund for the Culture and the Arts (1995-96). In 1996 she was the first Mexican to ever be awarded an accesit in the International Short-story Contest "Miguel de Unamuno" in Salamanca, Spain, where her story competed against 1,708 entries from Latin America and Spain. In the anthology of the winning stories, published by the Caja Salamanca y Soria in 1997, Martha is the only female and also the youngest writer. She appears alongside writers such as Juan Manuel de Prada.

Martha held a weekly column in the Cultural Section of newspaper Uno Mas Uno and its cultural supplement Sábado from 1993 to 1999. She has also collaborated with magazines such as Nexos, Etcetera, El Universo del Buho and El Reto. In Canada, she published articles in the Hispanic newspaper El Correo Canadiense. Her story Ants was published in Exile Literary Quarterly in the Summer Issue of 2006 (http://www.exilequarterly.com/302.html). Some of her short stories are featured online in the following websites www.ficticia.com, www.torontohispano.com, www.canasanta.com and www.palabrasdiversas.com.

Her articles, chronicles, reviews and short stories have appeared in diverse newspapers and magazines also in Spain, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Peru and Canada. Her short-stories have received awards in literary contests in Mexico and Spain. She published a short-story collection called A todos los voy a matar (I’m Going To Kill Them All) in 2000.

In December 2005, she was awarded the SOMOS Latin American Achievement Award in Toronto for her literary work.

[edit] Education

Martha Batiz has a Bachelor’s Degree in English Literature, a Master’s Degree in Latin American Literature, and is currently a second year PhD student at the University of Toronto, in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.^[1] She is about to complete her Certificate in Creative Writing at U of T, in the School of Continuing Studies. She also studied Drama and used to combine writing with her work as an actress in her country. She produced and played two roles in Ellas solas, which featured The Great Nebula in Orion and Ludlow Fair, by Lanford Wilson. The play ran a successful season from October 1997 to August 1998 in Mexico City. She worked in other theatre plays and in various soap operas. She plans to do her academic specialization in Latin American and Spanish Golden Age Theatre. ^[2] She lives in Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada.