Spanish · b. 1959
Aramburu grew up in San Sebastián during the years when ETA was killing people in the street, studied Spanish philology in Zaragoza, and then moved to Germany in 1985 to teach Spanish, where he has lived ever since. He says the distance is what made the writing possible. He published poetry and stories for two decades and was known chiefly to other writers until Patria appeared in 2016: a novel about two Basque families destroyed by a single ETA killing, which sold over a million copies in Spain, won the Premio Nacional de Narrativa and the Premio de la Crítica, was translated into more than thirty languages and became an HBO series. It also started a public argument in the Basque Country about who is entitled to narrate the conflict, which is still going on.