Nationality Spanish Name Juan Goytisolo Period 1954- Role Poet | Literary movement Post-Modernism Parents Julia Gay Siblings Jose Agustin Goytisolo | |
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Notable awards Miguel de Cervantes Prize2014 Nominations Man Booker International Prize, Neustadt International Prize for Literature Books Marks of Identity, Count Julian, Makbara, The Garden of Secrets, Juan the Landless Similar People Jose Agustin Goytisolo, Luis Goytisolo, Juan Marse, Fernando del Paso, Jose Donoso | ||
Juan goytisolo y almer a
Juan Goytisolo Gay (5 January 1931 – 4 June 2017) was a Spanish poet, essayist, and novelist. He lived in Marrakech from 1997 until his death in 2017. He was considered Spain's greatest living writer at the beginning of the 21st century, yet he had lived abroad since the 1950s. On 24 November 2014 he was awarded the Cervantes Prize, the most prestigious literary award in the Spanish-speaking world.
Contents
- Juan goytisolo y almer a
- Juan goytisolo na festivalu spisovatel 2012
- Background
- Career
- Family
- Fiction
- Essays
- Others
- Literary prizes
- References
Juan goytisolo na festivalu spisovatel 2012
Background
Juan Goytisolo was born to an aristocratic family. He claimed that this level of privilege, accompanied by the cruelties of his great-grandfather and the miserliness of his grandfather (discovered through the reading of old family letters and documents), was a major reason for his joining the Communist party in his youth. His father was imprisoned by the Republican government during the Spanish Civil War, while his mother, Julia Gay, was killed in the first Francoist air raid of Barcelona in 1938.
Career
After law studies, Goytisolo published his first novel, The Young Assassins, in 1954. His deep opposition to Francisco Franco led him into exile in Paris in 1956, where he worked as a reader for Gallimard. In the early 1960s, he was a friend of Guy Debord. Breaking with the realism of his earlier novels, he published Marks of Identity (1966), Count Julian (1970), and Juan the Landless (1975). As with all his works, they were banned in Spain until after Franco's death.
Count Julian (1970, 1971, 1974) takes up, in an act of outspoken defiance, the side of Julian, count of Ceuta, a man traditionally castigated as the ultimate traitor in Spanish history. In Goytisolo's own words, he imagines "the destruction of Spanish mythology, its Catholicism and nationalism, in a literary attack on traditional Spain." He identifies himself "with the great traitor who opened the door to Arab invasion." The narrator in this novel, an exile in North Africa, rages against his beloved Spain, forming an obsessive identification with the fabled Count Julian, dreaming that, in a future invasion, the ethos and myths central to Hispanic identity will be totally destroyed.
Family
Goytisolo was married to the publisher, novelist and screenwriter Monique Lange, related to Emmanuel Berl and the philosopher Henri Bergson. Lange died in 1996. After her death, he was noted as saying their once-shared Paris apartment had become like a tomb. In 1997 he moved to Marrakech, where he died in 2017.
His brothers José Agustín Goytisolo (1928–1999) and Luis Goytisolo (1935) were also writers.