Elas Nandino

Personal

Passions

Vocation

Notable

Mexican poet who worked as a surgeon at different hospitals during most of his life. He was open about his homosexuality, but this did not affect his career as a surgeon. His early poetry was rather sombre, focusing on topics like death, nighttime and dreams. From the 1950s his poetry became more personal, whereas his later poems combined eroticism and metaphysics. In 1982, he met and had a strong influence on the Chicano poet, Francisco X. Alarcón who was impressed with Nandino's bravery in living his life as an openly gay man in Mexico City. Nandino wished to support younger gay writers. He became Alarcon's "role model and soul mate." He was editor of several publications and promoter of writing workshops. In the last years of his life he received numerous awards both for his career as a poet and for his support to literature in Mexico, such as the Aguascalientes National Poetry Prize (1979) and the National Prize for Literature (1982). He died in Guadalajara, Jalisco on 2 October 1993 at the age of 93. Link to Wikipedia biography