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Leonora Carrington was born in 1917 in Lancashire, England, to an Irish mother and an English father. A precocious child, she was expelled from convent school as an unteachable teenager, and went to study in Florence before attending art school in London. In 1937 she met Max Ernst and moved with him to Paris, where she became a prominent figure in the still-flourishing Surrealist group. While in Paris she participated in Surrealist exhibitions and published her first stories.

With the advent of the war Max Ernst was interned by the French as an enemy alien and Leonora fled to Spain, and then migrated to New York and eventually Mexico City. There she remained for much of her life, raising her two sons, Gabriel and Pablo, together with her second husband, the Hungarian photographer Emerico Weisz. In Mexico she devoted herself to creating the body of paintings, graphics, textiles, and sculpture upon which rests her international reputation in the visual arts, as well as writing the classic fantasy The Hearing Trumpet and numerous short fictions and plays.

Her name became more and more associated with Latin America until the mid-1970s, when several long sojourns in New York and Chicago, rising interest in women artists, and publication of her literary work in English-speaking countries and in translations around the world brought her rediscovery among the cultural elite. New exhibitions in New York and London and publication of her short fictions and the memoir Down Below and autobiographical novella Little Francis raised her profile further during the 1980s and 90s. Leonora died in 2011 just as a younger generation of readers more widely schooled in works of the fantastic began to acclaim her as a visionary and precursor. A major retrospective of her work opened in 2018 at the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City.

 

 

 


Books about Leonora Carrington and Her Art

Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement, by Whitney Chadwick (1985)

The House of Fear: Notes from Down Below, by Leonora Carrington (1988)

The Reflowering of the Goddess, by Gloria Feman Orenstein (1990)

Leonora Carrington: The Mexican Years, 1943–1985, by The Mexican Museum, San Francisco (1991)

Leonora Carrington: Paintings, Drawings, and Sculptures 1940–1990, edited by Andrea Schlieker (1991)

Leyendas De La Novia Del Viento: Leonora Carrington Escritoria, Lourdes Andrade (2001)

Leonora Carrington: Historia en dos tiempos, Lourdes Andrade (1998)

Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy, and Art, by Susan L. Aberth (2004)

Leonora Carrington: Dibujo, Pintura y grabado, by Gabriel Weisz (2007)

Leonora antes de Leonora: Una vida imaginada, by Sofía G. Buzali (2013)

Leonora Carrington: The Celtic Surrealist, by the Irish Museum of Art (2013)

Leonora Carrington: Ultimas esculturas (2008–2011), by Pablo Weisz

The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington, by Joanna Moorhead (2017)

The Literary Work of Leonora Carrington

 


Paul De Angelis Book Development has provided literary representation for the writer and artist Leonora Carrington since 2003 and for the Estate since her death in May 2011. While at St. Martin’s Press I oversaw the first publication in their original language of Leonora’s classic fantasies, The Hearing Trumpet (1978) and The Stone Door (1977), and a decade later at E. P. Dutton published the story collection The Seventh Horse as well as The House of Fear, which included Leonora’s earliest fictions (such as “The Debutante”), her autobiographical novella Little Francis, and her memoir of being committed to a mental asylum at the onset of World War II, Down Below.

A renaissance of interest in Carrington’s writings picked up steam shortly after her death with the first publication of her Spanish-language children’s book, El Leche de Sueño (El Fondo de Cultura Economica, 2013, published by New York Review Books as The Milk of Dreams, 2017), followed by The Complete Stories (The Dorothy Project, 2017; UK title The Debutante & Other Stories, Silver Press) along with the reissuance of Down Below (New York Review Books, 2017). Translated versions of these and earlier works have been or are about to be published in Japan, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Poland, Mexico, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, Denmark, Brazil, and Portugal. Audio rights to The Hearing Trumpet are currently available from Naxos, and an audio version of The Complete Stories is forthcoming from Tantor Media. A volume of plays is also scheduled for publication in Spanish.

For inquiries about available rights, please contact me by email.