Ana María Matute Ausejo (26 July 1925 – 25 June 2014) was an internationally acclaimed Spanish writer and member of the
Real Academia Española.[1][2] In 1959, she received the
Premio Nadal for Primera memoria. The third woman to receive the
Cervantes Prize for her literary oeuvre, she is considered one of the foremost novelists of the posguerra, the period immediately following the
Spanish Civil War.[3]
Biography
Matute was born on 26 July 1925.[4] 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.[5]
Matute was ten years old when the
Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, and this internecine 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 side".[6]
Following the
Nationalist victory in 1939, Francisco Franco established a
military dictatorship, which lasted thirty-six years until his death in 1975. Since Matute matured as a writer in this posguerra period under the dictatorship, some of the most recurrent themes in her works are
violence,
alienation, misery, and especially the loss of
innocence.[5][6] Her work was heavily censored under Franco and she was blacklisted from working as a journalist.[7] At least once she was fined because of her writings.[4]
She published her first story, The Boy Next Door, when she was only 17 years old.[4] 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.[8] 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.[9]
Matute was a university professor. She studied at the international school at
Hilversum, 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.[10]
She lectured at the Tatem Arts Center of
Hood College in Maryland on 28 April 1969.[10] In 1978, she was a visiting professor at the
University of Virginia.[11] She was invited to speak at
Brigham Young University in Utah[12] on 12 March 1990, where she gave a lecture on Working the Craft of Translation in Spanish.[13] She was also a guest lecturer at the universities of Oklahoma, Indiana and Virginia.[citation needed]
She won the
Premio Nadal in 1958 for the first novel of the trilogy, Los Mercaderes.[4] Her other literary prizes included the
Planeta Prize and the
Café Gijón Prize.[15]
Death
On 25 June 2014, Matute died of a heart attack at the age of 88,[16][17] and was laid to rest in the
Cemetery of Montjuïc, Barcelona.
External Resources
The
Hispanic Division, located at the
Library of Congress in Washington, DC, has a special recording of Ana María Matute herself reading from her prose work Algunos muchachos. Recorded on 5 May 2000, this Spanish author recorded her reading of this work in Spanish at the Library of Congress. The recording of Matute herself is located in the Archive of Hispanic Literature, which can be located online. Contents include from Algunos muchachos: "Prologue" (2:54); "El rey de los zennos - I" (min. 4:13); II (min 14:21); III (min. 28:31).[18]
^
abVirgillo, Carmelo; L. Teresa Valdivieso; Edward H. Friedman (2004). Aproximaciones al estudio de la literatura hispanica. McGraw Hill.
ISBN0-07-255846-6.
^
abBallesteros, Jose; Mark Harpring; Francisca Paredes Mendezson Heinle (2005). Voces de España: AntologÃa Literaria.
ISBN0-7593-9666-3.
^Michael Scott Doyle (1993). "Translating Matute's Algunos Muchachos: Applied Critical Reading and Forms of Fidelity in The Heliotrope Wall and Other Stories".Translation Review. Schulte, Rainer and Dennis Kratz (eds.); ISSN 0737-4836. p. 30.