The Spanish writer and journalist Almudena Grandes, passed down for posterity for an erotic novel before causing a sensation more recently for a history of contemporary Spain, died on Saturday, announced the Spanish Prime Minister, hailing "
a reference of our time
".
Aged 61, she announced in October she was suffering from cancer.
Read alsoWhen Almudena Grandes stared at the Spanish Civil War
“
We are losing one of the benchmark writers of our time.
Committed and courageous, and who told our recent story with a progressive perspective.
Your memory, your work, will always be with us, Almudena Grandes
”, tweeted the head of the Spanish government Pedro Sanchez.
Read also Love during the Spanish Civil War
“
We bid farewell with great weight to Almudena Grandes, fundamental narrator of Spanish literature, who left much too early. Almudena Grandes has masterfully portrayed our recent history and gave a voice to those who had never had it,
”greeted the Cervantes Institute on Twitter, to which she has been invited many times around the world.
Born in Madrid in 1960, Almudena Grandes became known with an erotic novel which caused a scandal in 1989,
Las edades de Lulu
, brought to the screen and translated into French in 1990 under the title
Les vies de Loulou
.
She then published in 1991, in a different genre,
Te llamaré viernes
, a love story between outsiders in a hostile Madrid then, in 1994,
Malena es un number of tango
(in French,
Malena is a name of tango
), acclaimed novel in which she dealt with one of her recurring themes : an imperfect and rebellious young girl struggling to find her place in the world against social norms. In 2010, she embarked on an ambitious six-volume project recounting the years after the Civil War in Spain.
She regularly wrote editorials in the big daily
El Pais
, and in mid-October, she wrote about the cancer she had been diagnosed with and from which she died. “
I have had to write very complicated articles in my life. None like this
”,she said. "
It all started a little over a year ago: a routine examination, a malignant tumor, a good prognosis and a fight
”.
Activist for many causes, women or aid to migrants, in 2010 she defended Judge Garzon accused of having wanted to investigate the crimes amnestied by Francoism, signing a manifesto with the filmmaker Pedro Almodovar and the poet communist Marcos Ana.