Camilo José Cela

Camilo José Cela was born in 1916 in the parish of Iria Flavia, in Padrón, Galicia, to a Galician father and a mother of English and Italian descent. The family moved to Madrid when he was a boy. A bout of tuberculosis in his youth gave him long periods of reading, and he attended university classes in medicine, law and literature without completing a degree. When the Civil War broke out he crossed to the Nationalist side, served as a soldier and was wounded.

His first novel, The Family of Pascual Duarte (1942), the confession of a condemned peasant who has killed without remorse, caused a sensation; its unflinching violence gave a name, tremendismo, to a strain of postwar fiction. He worked for a time as a censor under Franco, yet The Hive, a panorama of hungry, compromised Madrid in 1942 with some three hundred characters, was refused publication in Spain and appeared in Buenos Aires in 1951. Cela was also a tireless traveller on foot, and Journey to the Alcarria (1948) began a series of travel books that renewed the genre. From the late 1960s, with San Camilo, 1936 and Mazurka for Two Dead Men, his work grew more experimental, built from repetitions, voices and fragments.

Elected to the Royal Spanish Academy in 1957, he founded the literary review Papeles de Son Armadans in Mallorca, sat as a royal appointee in the Senate during the transition to democracy, and became a combative, often provocative public figure. After the Nobel Prize in 1989 he received the Cervantes Prize in 1995 and was made Marquess of Iria Flavia in 1996. He died in Madrid in 2002.