Del Paso was born in Mexico City and took two years in economics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He lived in London for 14 years, where he worked for the British Broadcasting Corporation and in France, where he worked for Radio France Internationale and briefly served as Consul General of Mexico.
He has been a member of El Colegio Nacional de México since 1996 and won several international awards, including the Premio Miguel de Cervantes (2015), Alfonso Reyes International Prize (2013),[3] the FIL Literature Prize (2007) Guadalajara International Book Fair), the Rómulo Gallegos Prize (1982), the Best Novel Published in France Award (1985) for Palinurus of Mexico, the Xavier Villaurrutia Award (1966) and the Mexico Novel Award (1976).
Noticias del Imperio (1986) is an important contribution to the Latin American new historical novel. The novel, based upon the lives of Maximilian and Carlota and the French Intervention in Mexico, is called by the author a "historiographic" novel. This encyclopedic novel is remarkable in that, instead of trying to discover the "truth" about "what really happened," the author presents a number of possible versions of important and controversial events.[citation needed]
Del Paso claimed influence from a variety of authors including Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Erskine Caldwell, and Thomas Wolfe.[4]
On May 14, 2007, the Universidad de Guadalajara paid homage to Fernando del Paso by naming the library and media center in Ocotlán, Jalisco, the "Biblioteca Fernando del Paso". This library is the largest in the western region of Mexico with a collection of 120,000 volumes and a capacity for 800 simultaneous users.
