Notes on a poet

Born in Guerrero, Mexico, Orlando Mondragón is the youngest winner of the LOEWE FOUNDATION International Poetry Prize, awarded for his sublime collection Human Pathology Notebooks, inspired by his experiences as a surgeon in a Mexico City hospital.


“Escribo lo que me atraviesa” (I write what touches me)

Mondragón’s poetry draws on memory, everyday life and his accumulated experiences in medical care, to reveal deep beauty in even the most harrowing of moments. For him, inspiration takes the form of a sudden intuition, “a preverbal emotion that finds its words.”