David Toscana

David Toscana (born 7 November 1961, Monterrey, Nuevo León) is a Mexican writer. He has received numerous awards, among them the Xavier Villaurrutia Award, awarded by the Mexican writers' community to what it considers the best book published in Mexico that year, and the 2026 winner of the Alfaguara Prize.

Biography Before embarking on a literary career, he graduated as an Industrial and Systems Engineer from the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM). Subsequently, he studied at the Escuela de Escritores of the Sociedad General de Escritores de México (SOGEM).

His literary influences include the Spanish classics Miguel de Cervantes and Pedro Calderón de la Barca, and the Latin American writers Juan Carlos Onetti, Jorge Luis Borges, and José Donoso, as well as the Latin American fantastic tradition. Since 2012, he has contributed a column, Toscanadas, to the weekly supplement Laberinto of the newspaper Milenio. He currently resides in Europe.

Work Toscana's work addresses themes of failure, death, and grief, as illustrated by his novel El último lector, which received the Antonin Artaud Prize, the Premio Bellas Artes de Narrativa Colima para Obra Publicada, and the José Fuentes Mares Prize.

In 2017 he received the Xavier Villaurrutia Award for his novel Olegaroy. The same novel earned him the Premio Elena Poniatowska 2018. In 2026, he won the Alfaguara Prize for his novel El ejército ciego. His work has been published in fifteen languages, including Arabic, French, Greek, Italian, and Serbian.