Spanish · 1933–2020
Marsé's mother died at his birth and he was handed to another family in a taxi; he left school at thirteen to work as an apprentice jeweller and stayed at the bench for twelve years. He wrote his first novels in the evenings, spent a period in Paris translating for a laboratory and working as Jean Cayrol's assistant, and then came back to the Barcelona neighbourhoods that are the whole of his subject: the Guinardó and the Carmelo, the losers of the Civil War, the boys who invented stories to survive their fathers' defeat, and the girls who married upward out of the district. He wrote in Castilian in a Catalan city and was attacked for it from both sides for fifty years. He won the Cervantes Prize in 2008 and remained rude about literary Barcelona to the end.