The novelist, essayist, columnist, academic of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language (RAE), winner of the National Prize for Spanish Letters in 2013 and the National Prize for Literature in 1992 Luis Goytisolo Gay died this Monday at the age of 91. Born on March 17, 1935 in Barcelona, he was the brother of the poet José Agustín Goytisolo (died in 1999) and the writer Juan Goytisolo (died in 2017).
In 1958, having just graduated in Law, he won the Biblioteca Breve Prize with his novel The outskirtswhich was followed the same words (1962). The first of the books in the tetralogy Antagonismdedicated to his wife, María Antonia Gil Moreno de Mora, and which cost him several years of work, was Count (1973). The quartet was completed with The greens of May to the sea (City of Barcelona Award 1976), The wrath of Achilles (1979) y Theory of knowledge (1981).
He continued in the eighties with other novels such as Trail of fire that departs (1984), which won the 1985 Critics’ Prize; The paradox of the migratory bird (1987) o Fables (1988). Goytisolo was a regular contributor to EL PAÍS; In the nineties he took over from the late Carlos Barral as director of the literary magazine International Letter. In 1992 he published the novel Statue with dovesawarded the National Narrative Prize and where the author played with time, Trajan’s Rome and today’s Spain. It was precisely as a result of the preparation of this work that he thought about the creation of the Luis Goytisolo Foundation for the study of contemporary Hispanic narrative, which, based in El Puerto de Santa María (Cádiz), has held an International Symposium on Contemporary Hispanic Narrative every year since 2003.
In 1993 he wrote about his journey through thirteen countries bordering the Indian Ocean, and under that same title he was awarded the best travel book by the magazine Books, in addition to giving rise to a successful television documentary series. Elected as a Language Academician in 1994 for the vacancy of the poet Luis Rosales (seat C), Goytisolo entered in 1995 with a speech in defense of the autonomy of language against the influence of the image. In 1998 the second part of his series began to be broadcast. Indian (born from the reports for EL PAÍS) and also made the series for TVE Mediterranean (2000). In those years they came out Stairway to heaven (1999) y 360 degree diary (2000). Then they came The future of the word (2002), the novel Release (2003), the set of annotations, aphorisms and word games Fables (2004) or the compendium Three exemplary comedies (2005), formed by Mzugo (1996), Liquifying pleasure (1997) y Stairway to heaven (1999).
Other of his novels are Listening ear for birds (2006), things that happen (2009), an evocation of childhood and youth; The lake in the pupils (2012), or the essay Nature of the novelwinner of the 2013 Anagrama Essay Prize. This same year he won the National Literature Prize, in recognition of all his literary work.
In 2014, when his brother Juan Goytisolo won the Cervantes, the most important award in Spanish Literature, an edition in which he was also nominated, he said of the winner: “My brother Juan deserves it and, due to age, they had to give it to him first. It also happened with the Nacional de las Letras, which Juan won in 2008 and I in 2013.” Regarding his militancy in the PCE, Luis Goytisolo acknowledged in another interview in 2014, on the occasion of the publication of Things that happen, that he never believed in Marxism and that if he became a communist militant at the end of the 50s it was to “fight Francoism”, which led to a four-month stay in Carabanchel prison. In 2015, Goytisolo sold part of his personal archive to the National Library, a series of documents, representative of his career as a novelist, essayist and columnist, stored in 57 boxes.
In May 2016 he presented in Barcelona The traffic jam and other fables, a compilation of fables written over forty years and that begins with The jam. “The world is difficult and crazy and the most surprising thing is that in the first fable, written in the midst of Franco’s regime, this was already reflected,” he told this newspaper in his presentation. On November 1, 2018, the veteran writer received the prestigious Carlos Fuentes Award for Literary Creation in the Spanish Language of that year from the then president of Mexico, Enrique Peña Nieto. Among his latest published titles are Coincidences (2017) y sparks (2019), in which he presents short texts about current society, in which there is no shortage of humor.
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