Spanish · 1902–1999
Alberti came from a wine family in Puerto de Santa María on the Bay of Cádiz, trained as a painter, and turned to poetry after an illness. His first book, Marinero en tierra — a sailor stranded inland — won the National Prize for Literature in 1925 when he was twenty-three. Then came a breakdown and Sobre los ángeles, a book of desolate free verse that broke the sunny neo-popular manner he had invented. He joined the Communist Party in 1931, ran propaganda for the Republic during the war, and left with the defeated in 1939, spending twenty-four years in Argentina and fourteen in Rome before returning in 1977 to be elected a deputy for Cádiz. He kept painting all his life, illustrated his own books, won the Cervantes Prize in 1983, and died at ninety-six as the last survivor of the Generation of '27.