Spanish · 1921–2004
Laforet grew up in the Canary Islands, arrived in Barcelona at eighteen to study, and at twenty-three won the first Nadal Prize with a first novel that told the country what its cities looked like after the war. Nada sold out its printing, made her instantly famous, and became the book against which Spanish postwar fiction is measured. She never repeated it. She published three more novels and some stories over the next twenty years, then effectively stopped, corresponded for decades with Ramón J. Sender in letters that show a writer arguing with her own silence, converted to and then drifted from Catholicism, and lived out of view. Aphasia took her language in her last years. Critics have spent seventy years asking what happened; the honest answer is that she wrote one book that could not be followed and declined to fake a career.