Camilo Jose Cela

Camilo José Cela was born on May 11, 1916 in Iria Flavia, Galicia, Spain. He was the son of a Galician father and a mother of English and Italian ancestry. He had an illustrious family: his brother Ricardo was a painter, writer and engraver, and his nephew Julio Caro Baroja was a well-known anthropologist. He studied art and painting at San Fernando Escuela de Arte, in Madrid. During the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), he served as a medical orderly in the Republican Army. After the war, he was condemned to death by the Nationalists, but the sentence was commuted to imprisonment. He was held in prison for more than six years. During his imprisonment, he wrote his first play, Palabras en la arena (Words in the Sand), which was not published until 1954. After being released in 1946, he wrote his first novel, La familia de Pascual Duarte (The Family of Pascual Duarte) in 1942. This novel presented a graphic picture of Spain after the Civil War and won the Lope de Vega Prize, establishing Cela as one of the foremost authors in Spain. His novel La colmena (The Hive) was published in Buenos Aires in 1951, having been banned in Spain for its criticism of Franco's regime. He continued writing novels and essays that combined realism and symbolism to explore the social and political problems of his time. He also wrote biographies of historical figures, such as Juan Van Halen and Miguel de Unamuno. He also painted and drew extensively during his life. He married María del Rosario Conde Picavea in 1955 and had one son with her: Camilo José Cela Conde. He was an active supporter of democracy and joined the Real Academia Española in 1957. He held various cultural posts during the transition to democracy after Franco's death in 1975. He received several awards and honors for his literary work, such as the Lenin Peace Prize in 1954, the Cervantes Prize in 1986 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1989 "for a rich and intensive prose, which with restrained compassion forms a challenging vision of man's vulnerability". He died due to heart failure on January 17, 2002 in Madrid at the age of 85 . He is regarded as one of the most important and influential writers and novelists of Spanish literature in the 20th century. He is also remembered as a brilliant writer and orator who left a rich legacy of books, speeches and articles .