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Carmen Martín Gaite. Andreu Dalmau / EFE
José Teruel Wins Comillas Prize with Biography on Writer Carmen Martín Gaite

José Teruel Wins Comillas Prize with Biography on Writer Carmen Martín Gaite

The jury praises the "meticulous reconstruction" of the life of the narrator and essayist and the author's access to unpublished documentation.

Antonio Paniagua

Madrid

Jueves, 16 de enero 2025, 19:00

José Teruel is the winner of the XXXVII Comillas Prize for History, Biography, and Memoirs, organized by the Tusquets publishing house, for a book about the life of Carmen Martín Gaite. The jury praised the "meticulous reconstruction" of the life of the narrator and essayist, one of the most prominent literary voices in the Spanish language of the 20th century. 'Carmen Martín Gaite. A Biography' brilliantly describes the social and literary context of a narrator who managed to captivate several generations of readers, according to the publisher, which announces that the work will be published on March 12.

José Teruel, honorary professor of Spanish Literature at the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM), "evokes with exquisite sensitivity the tragedies that shaped the personality of the Salamanca-born author," tragedies including the death of her son Miguel at seven months due to meningitis, and her daughter Marta, at 29, due to AIDS.

Amicable, unruly, and charismatic, she lived through a disastrous marriage with fellow writer Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio. According to Tusquets, the author provides enlightening keys to interpret a literary world of great psychological depth, illuminated by the wise handling of fascinating correspondence, countless personal notes of Martín Gaite, and many unpublished texts. "On the centenary of the writer's birth, this masterful biography is destined to be the reference work in studies about her life and writing."

Letters and notebooks

To compose this exhaustive biography, the author has accessed a vast amount of documentation, largely unpublished or little known, consisting of letters and numerous notebooks of notes, observations of all kinds by the writer, as well as data provided by family and friends who knew her well. "The result is the portrait of a writer who opened many paths closed to women in those years, and of a novelist and essayist who discovered the multiple nuances hidden in seemingly mundane existences," claims Tusquets.

The jury was chaired by Miguel Ángel Aguilar and composed of Jordi Amat, Isabel Burdiel, and Mercedes Cabrera. "This excellent work on Carmen Martín Gaite, besides addressing a glaring gap about one of the great Spanish-language writers of the second half of the 20th century, is capable of illuminating a whole world that, without nullifying the author's personality, transcends it. Furthermore, José Teruel demonstrates, without unnecessary jargon, that he knows what a biography is and what it is for," argues Isabel Burdiel, jury member and historian.

Carmen Martín Gaite (Salamanca, 1925-Madrid, 2000) was born into a bourgeois family with liberal ideas that instilled in her an unconventional education for the time. In the late 1940s, after graduating in Romance Philology from the University of Salamanca, the future writer moved to Madrid to pursue her doctorate. In the capital, she reconnected with Ignacio Aldecoa and through him met prominent representatives of the mid-century generation, such as Jesús Fernández Santos, Alfonso Sastre, and Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, whom she married in 1953.

With her first short novel, 'The Spa', she won the Café Gijón Prize in 1955, and three years later, her novel 'Behind the Curtains' earned her the prestigious Nadal Prize. Thus began one of the most brilliant and interesting literary careers in recent Spanish-language literature, in which stand out, among other novels and stories, 'The Back Room', 'Variable Cloudiness', 'The Snow Queen', or 'Little Red Riding Hood in Manhattan', as well as the essays 'Loving Uses of the Eighteenth Century in Spain', 'The Never-Ending Story', and 'Loving Uses of Postwar Spain'.

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