Spanish · b. 1951
Joseba Irazu Garmendia writes as Bernardo Atxaga in Basque, a language with around three quarters of a million speakers and no relatives anywhere. He studied economics in Bilbao, worked as an economist, a bookseller, a printer and a scriptwriter, and belonged to the experimental group Pott in the 1970s that set out to give Basque a modern literature more or less from nothing. Obabakoak won the Spanish Premio Nacional de Narrativa in 1989 — the first book in Basque to do so — and has been translated into more than thirty languages, in most cases from the author's own Spanish version. His later novels deal directly with the violence of the Basque conflict. He was elected to Euskaltzaindia, the Academy of the Basque Language, and lives in Zalduondo in Álava.