Almudena Grandes
# Almudena Grandes

María de la Almudena Grandes Hernández (7 May 1960 – 27 November 2021) was a Spanish writer. Author of 14 novels and three short-story collections, her work has been translated into twenty languages and frequently adapted to film. She won the National Literature Prize for Narrative and the Prix Méditerranée among other honors. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called her "one of the most important writers of our time."

## Early life and career

Almudena Grandes was born on 7 May 1960 in the Chamartín neighborhood of Madrid, Spain. She began writing when she was nine and obtained a degree in Geography and History at the Complutense University of Madrid. Following her degree, she started out writing texts for encyclopedias. Drawing on her experiences during the Movida Madrileña, she published her first novel Las edades de Lulú in 1989, an erotic and unbridled novel which achieved great success and won La Sonrisa Vertical prize, having been translated into twenty languages thus far. Director Bigas Luna made a film out of her novel, The Ages of Lulu, starring Javier Bardem. Emilie L. Bergmann said, the novel "represented a breakthrough for eroticism in women's writing" having sold more than 1.5 million copies worldwide.

Her second novel Te llamaré Viernes was published in 1991 and was adapted for cinema by Gerardo Herrero in 1996. That year, she also published Modelos de mujer. The publication of her third novel, Malena es un nombre de tango, in 1994 was also a great success.

Later she published Atlas de geografía humana in 1998 (which was transformed into a film by Azucena Rodríguez), Los aires difíciles, in 2002, Castillos de cartón in 2004 and El corazón helado in 2007.

In 2010 she published the novel Inés y la alegría, the first in a series of six novels entitled Episodios de una Guerra Interminable. This novel narrates episodes of the anti-Francoist resistance. With Inés y la alegría, she won the "Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz" literature prize. It was followed by El lector de Julio Verne in 2012, Las tres bodas de Manolita (2014) and Los pacientes del doctor García in 2017, the latter of which led her to win the National Literature Prize for Narrative. Her last finished novel, La madre de Frankenstein, was published in 2020. In it, she contemplated the life of Aurora Rodríguez Carballeira, a woman in 20th-century Spain who shot her own daughter rather than lose control of her.

## Style

Grandes' literary work was influenced by 19th century Spanish writers Emilia Pardo Bazán and Benito Pérez Galdós, among others. Her books speak about the Spanish people in the last quarter of the 20th century and the first years of the 21st century, in a style characterized by realism and psychological introspection.

When she was a child, her grandfather gave her Odyssey by Homer and she considered that, together with Don Quixote, they were the two major influences for her work and particularly for her interest in characters who were survivor archetypes, muddling through their circumstances one way or another, as opposed to heroes and antiheroes.

Grandes was politically left-wing, and her work revolves around Francisco Franco's regime and the impact it had on democracy.

## Views and activism

Grandes was a vocal leftist, saying that it was reading that led her to these politics. On several occasions she voted for the United Left party. She was a regular columnist of the newspaper El País and a contributor to radio programs such as Cadena SER. She also considered herself anticlerical and republican.

In April 2007, Grandes was one of the signatories of a manifesto, in which a group of intellectuals considered it unacceptable to commit acts of terrorism; in addition, during the demonstration after ETA's attack on Madrid Airport, she read the statement "For peace, life, liberty and against terrorism." That attack, in which two people died, marked the end of a ceasefire during which ETA had been in negotiation with the government of Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero. Grandes also gave her opinion about Spanish society, which she argued had become dumb and vulgar, and blighted by consumerism, materialism, and indifference to suffering. In Los besos en el pan (2015), she wrote about the Spanish crisis of 2008 and claimed that humility was the only way to get rid of it.

Grandes harshly criticized right-wing parties and politicians, and also left-wing ones, especially during the constitutional crisis in Catalonia. She was also involved in the feminist movement, and was present during feminist demonstrations and protests.

She was also a tireless social activist. In 1998 she was a member of Izquierda Abierta and showed support for the self-incrimination of Ramona Maneiro. Maneiro had assisted her partner Ramón Sampedro in euthanasia.

## Personal life and death

Grandes married poet Luis García Montero in 1994, with whom she had one daughter. From a previous marriage she had one son. She was a fan of Atlético Madrid.

In October 2021, Grandes announced that she was suffering from cancer, which had been diagnosed in the previous year. She died on 27 November 2021, at the age of 61.

