Laura Esquivel

Biography

Laura Esquivel (born 1950 in Mexico City) trained as a kindergarten teacher before turning to writing. She wrote children's theater and screenplays before Like Water for Chocolate, which she wrote as a novel after her screenplay was rejected. The novel was published in Mexico in 1989 (Como agua para chocolate), became a #1 bestseller, was translated into 35 languages, and was adapted into a film in 1992 directed by her then-husband Alfonso Arau. Esquivel grew up in a Mexico where the kitchen was still largely a female world, and where the women who preceded her had left almost no literary record — their lives encoded instead in recipes passed down through families.

Laura Esquivel at a glance