Ana María Matute

Biography

Matute was born on 26 July 1925. At the age of four she almost died from a chronic kidney infection, and was taken to live with her grandparents in Mansilla de la Sierra, a small town in the mountains, for a period of recovery. Matute says that she was profoundly influenced by the villagers whom she met during her time there. This influence can be seen in such works as those published in her 1961 collection Historias de la Artámila ("Stories from Artámila"), all of which deal with the people that Matute met during her recovery. Settings reminiscent of that town are also often used as settings for her other work.

Matute was ten years old when the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, and this conflict is said to have had the greatest impact on Matute's writing. She considered not only "the battles between the two factions, but also the internal aggression within each one". The war resulted in Francisco Franco's rise to power, starting in 1936 and escalating until 1939, when he took control of the entire country. Franco established a dictatorship which lasted thirty-six years, until his death in 1975. The violence brought on by the war continued through much of his reign. Since Matute matured as a writer in this posguerra period under Franco's oppressive regime, some of the most recurrent themes in her works are violence, alienation, misery, and especially the loss of innocence. Her work was sometimes censored by the Franco regime, and at least once she was fined because of her writings.

She published her first story, "The Boy Next Door," when she was only 17 years old. Matute was known for her sympathetic treatment of the lives of children and adolescents, their feelings of betrayal and isolation, and their rites of passage. She often interjected such elements as myth, fairy tale, the supernatural, and fantasy into her works. She was outspoken about subjects such as the benefits of emotional suffering, the constant changing of a human being, and how innocence is never completely lost.

Matute was a university professor. She studied at the international school of Hilversum in the Netherlands, and traveled to various countries as a lecturer or guest instructor. Her academic work in the United States spanned four decades, beginning as early as 1966 when she spoke at Our Lady of Cincinnati College. She lectured at the Tatem Arts Center of Hood College in Maryland on April 28, 1969. In 1978, she was a visiting professor at the University of Virginia. She was invited to speak at Brigham Young University in Utah on March 12, 1990, where she gave a lecture on "Working the Craft of Translation" in Spanish. She was also a guest lecturer at the universities of Oklahoma, Indiana and Virginia.

She was an honorary member of the Hispanic Society of America and a member of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese. She won the Spanish literary award, the Premio Nadal, in 1958 for the first novel of the trilogy, Los Mercaderes. Her other literary prizes included the Planeta Prize and the Café Gijón Prize.

On 25 June 2014, Matute died of a heart attack at the age of 88.