Taibo has lived in Mexico City since the age of 9, when in 1958 his family fled from Spain to Mexico. Taibo II is an intellectual, historian, professor, journalist, social activist, union organizer, and world-renowned writer. Widely known for his policial novels, he is considered the founder of the neopolicial genre in Latin America and is the president of the International Association of Political Writers. One of the most prolific writers in Mexico today, over 500 editions of his 51 books have been published in 29 countries and over a dozen languages, and include novels, narrative, historical essays, chronicles, and poetry. Some of PIT's novels have been mentioned among the "Books of the Year" by
The New York Times,
Le Monde, and the
Los Angeles Times. He has received numerous awards including the Grijalbo, the Planeta/Joaquin Mortiz in 1992, the Dashiell Hammett three times for his policial novels, and the 813 for the best police novel published in France. His biography of
Ernesto "Che" Guevara (
Ernesto Guevara, tambien conocido como el Che, 1996) has sold over half a million copies around the world and won the 1998
Bancarella Book of the Year award in Italy. To date nobody has been held accountable for these crimes. Among PIT's most popular works is a series of detective novels, written against the prevailing bourgeois state in Mexico in the last few decades of the 20th century, with the protagonist, Mexican Private Investigator Héctor Belascoarán Shayne, who was introduced in the novel
Días de combate. PIT wrote eight more novels with this character. The character has been adapted several times for film and television, most recently for the 2022
Netflix series
Belascoarán starring
Luis Gerardo Méndez. Other novels include:
Cuatro manos (Four Hands);
Sombra de la sombra (Shadow of the Shadow);
Amorosos fantasmas; and
Temporada de Zopilotes: Una historia narrativa sobre la Decena Trágica ''(Buzzards' season: A narrative history about the
Ten Tragic Days)
and, the last of the series, Muertos incómodos
(The Uncomfortable Dead''), co-authored with
Subcomandante Marcos. PIT organizes the "Semana Negra" ("The Noir Week"), a crime fiction festival held every year in his birth city of
Gijón in Spain. ==Family==