FIL Program 2024 Program Search
Spain, Guest of Honor
Guest of Honor Pavilion
Journeys. Tribute to Carmen Martín Gaite
Guest of Honor Pavilion
Journeys. Tribute to Carmen Martín Gaite
The year 2025 will mark the centenary of the birth of Carmen Martín Gaite (1925-2000), the Salamanca native who was one of the most outstanding and renowned voices of Spanish literature. In 1978, she was the first woman to receive the National Fiction Award for Back Room, a prize she received again in 1994 for her work as a whole. In 1988, she shared the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature with poet José Valente. Her vocation for writing led her to explore all literary genres: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, story, drama, children's literature, literary criticism, translation and screenplays for cinema and television. But it was her non-novel phase that introduced her to the public at large. Her long career began in the post-war period and continued through the Transition to reach the 90s, with Spain as a full-fledged democracy. Behind the Curtains, Back Room, Caperucita en Manhattan, Variable Cloud variable and Los parentescos, her last and unfinished novel, are some of the unforgettable books for readers and writers of all generations who turned Carmen Martín Gaite into a leading author both inside and outside Spain. Her literature was never detached from reality, from the political, social and existential changes that writers of the so-called Generation of '50 experienced, who, under the gray and precarious skies of the Franco dictatorship, shared stories and common desires. "Literature is like a quenching of that thirst for expression that life sometimes denies us," she once declared. And it is precisely of that quenching, of that thirst for expression that her words speak. Of loneliness, of the impossibility of communication, but also of friendship; of women prisoners in physical and emotional spaces in constant search for interlocutors and escape routes that reaffirm their identity and release them from the parameters set by a patriarchal society will be some of the topics that will be addressed in this discussion around the life and vocation to literature of an exceptional author.
Participants: María Folguera, Azahara Alonso
Moderator: Inés Martín Rodrigo
Tuesday, December 03
16:00 to 16:50