Jorge Luis Volpi Escalante (born July 10, 1968) is a Mexican author best known for his 1999 novel En busca de Klingsor. Volpi was born in Mexico City. He studied law and literature at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and received a PhD in Spanish philology at the University of Salamanca in Spain. After his career as a student, Jorge Volpi became a lawyer, and for two years he was a secretary for Diego Valadés, the Mexican general state lawyer. After being Valadés’ secretary for two years, Volpi helped found the "Crack Movement". The authors that are a part of this Mexican literary group, for instance Eloy Urroz, Ignacio Padilla, and Pedro Angel Palou, write beyond magic realism and mimick the ideals of the 1968 Latin American literary ‘Boom.’ These authors were not interested in defining ‘Mexican Literature,’ instead they wanted Mexican authors to find their own voice and implement that into their writings. Volpi, himself, was influenced by authors such as Juan Rulfo, Carlos Fuentes and Octavio Paz.

Volpi is best known for his novels and essays. As a former lawyer and a successful scholar, Volpi’s academic interests are abundant in his work. His most famous book, 'En busca de Klingsor' (In Search of Klingsor, 1999) is a novel that fuses a story of Nazi generals in World War II and the history of physics. In this novel an American physicist and a German mathematician are on a mission to discover information about Klingsor, the codename for the person in charge of the Nazi party's scientific research. On their odyssey the two are lead to some of the greatest scientists of all time. For his work on this novel, Volpi won the Spanish literary prize, Premio Biblioteca Breve, in addition to the French Deux-Océans-Grinzane-Cavour-Prize. He is currently teaching in the literature department at the UDLA in Puebla, Pue..

In January 2007 he was appointed the director of Canal 22, a State sponsored cultural TV channel

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Jorge Volpi", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0