In 1996, at the age of 27, Enrigue was awarded the prestigious Joaquín Mortiz Prize for his first novel, La muerte de un instalador (Death of an Installation Artist). Since then it has been reprinted five times, and in 2012 it was selected as one of the key novels of the Mexican 20th century, and anthologized by Mexico’s largest publishing house, Fondo de Cultura Económica. His books Vidas perpendiculares (Perpendicular Lives) and Hipotermia (Hypothermia) have also been widely acclaimed.

In 2007, he was selected as one of the most influential contemporary writers in Spanish by the Hay Festival’s Bogotá39. In 2009, he was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation Residence Fellowship at the Bellagio Centre to finish the manuscript of his last novel, Decencia (Decency). In 2011 he became a fellow at the Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars of the New York Public Library, where he began working on his fifth novel.

Both novels have been published by Gallimard. Hypothermia, which offers an “unflinching gaze towards 21st-century life and the immigrant experience”, was published in 2013 in the United States and England by Dalkey Archive Press in a translation by Brendan Riley. His 2011 novel, Decencia (Decency), received praises in Latin America’s and Spain’s most relevant publications.

On November 4, 2013, Enrigue’s novel Muerte súbita (Sudden Death) was announced as the winner of the 31st Herralde Novel Prize, joining a distinguished list of works by authors from Spain and Latin America, including Sergio Pitol, Enrique Vila-Matas, Álvaro Pombo, Javier Marías, Juan Villoro, and Roberto Bolaño.