Spanish · 1920–2010
Delibes fought on Franco's side as a teenage volunteer in the navy, then spent the rest of his life writing about the people the regime forgot: farm labourers, poachers, retarded boys, small-town clerks, and the emptied villages of Old Castile. He edited the Valladolid newspaper El Norte de Castilla until the censors made the job impossible and he resigned rather than soften the paper's reporting on rural poverty. He was a hunter who wrote the best Spanish prose about the countryside since the Golden Age and an ecologist before the word was current in Spain. Five Hours with Mario, a widow's night-long monologue over her husband's body, is the sharpest portrait of the two Spains that survived the Civil War. He won the Cervantes Prize in 1993 and sat in the Royal Spanish Academy for forty-seven years, and he kept living in Valladolid the whole time.