Vicente Leñero, the celebrated Mexican author, playwright, and journalist has died at the age of 81 from lung cancer.

The genre-juggling writer is perhaps best known for his work "Los Albañiles," which won the prestigious Premio Biblioteca Breve Award and tells, in a complex symbolic structure, the story of a watchman at a construction site in Mexico.

Leñero was born June 9, 1933, in the western city of Guadalajara.

He graduating from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in 1959 with a degree in civil engineering but soon turned to writing in order to support himself, publishing his first novel La Voz Adolorida in 1961.

Focusing on journalism in the 1970s, he wrote for Claudia and Excélsior, and helped to found the influential Mexico City-based magazine Proceso.

He became well known for co-authoring, along with Carlos Marín, a book on journalism called Manual de Periodismo.

Leñero enjoyed work as a screenwriter, writing the script for El Callejón de los Milagros (The Alley of Miracles) which starred an up-and-coming Salma Hayek, and El Crimen del Padre Amaro (The Crime of Padre Amaro) which ignited a controversy in Mexico at the time of its release due to its frank depiction of the spiritual struggles of priests.

Despite Catholic bishops and organizations asking people not to see El Crimen del Padre Amaro, the film become one of the highest grossing Mexican films of all time.

In 1995 Leñero was awarded the Ariel Award by the Mexican Academy of Film.

According to an AP article, Tovar y de Teresa, the president of Mexico's National Council for Culture and the Arts, described the writer as "one of the great figures of Mexican letters of the 20th century."

"I don't like that stories end,” remarked Leñero famously, “Not in the movies, not in literature, not in real life."  He continued on to say, as quoted in Latin Times, that there “has to be always more possibilities, more paths, more answers. I believe in eternal life, because we never fully die."