Elena Garro, 77; Award-Winning Mexican Writer

Elena Garro, a Mexican playwright and novelist, died Saturday of heart and lung failure. She was 77.

The former wife of the late Mexican poet and Nobel laureate Octavio Paz, Garro had suffered from emphysema for years.

Garro wrote more than two dozen best-selling novels in Spanish and as many plays, and won several literary awards, including the Sor Inez de la Cruz, one of Mexico’s top prizes.

Her foremost novel was “Recuerdos del Porvenir” (Remembrances of the Future). Other works included “Reencuentro con Personajes” (Re-Encountering Personages), “La Casa Junto al Rio” (The House Next to the River) and “Memorias de Espana” (Memories of Spain).

Few of her works were translated into English, but she was well known in Europe, especially in Spain.

She met and married Paz in 1937 and the young couple moved to Spain soon afterward to write about the Spanish Civil War.

Both were supporters of the Republican forces fighting against dictator Francisco Franco’s military-backed rightist movement. In Madrid, Garro and Paz met other leftist writers such as Andre Malraux, Andre Gide, Stephen Spender, Antonio Machado and the Soviet propagandist Ilya Ehrenburg.

The marriage ended in an angry divorce three decades later. The two had not reconciled before Paz died on April 19.