Spanish · 1925–2014
Matute was ten when the Civil War started and lost her speech for a period as a child; she said afterwards that the war made her a writer and that she never entirely left childhood. Her novels are full of children watching adults do unforgivable things — brothers on opposite sides, servants and heirs, islands where the war arrives as rumour and then as fact. She wrote in a lyrical, almost fairy-tale register that critics initially mistook for softness. Franco's censors cut her; her marriage ended and she lost custody of her son for years under the laws of the time; she stopped publishing for two decades. She won the Nadal, the Planeta and the Premio Nacional, entered the Royal Spanish Academy in 1996 as its third woman, and took the Cervantes Prize in 2010 at eighty-five.