Juan Goytisolo

(1931 - 2017)

Born in Barcelona, the writer Juan Goytisolo lost his mother when he was only seven, killed in an air raid while shopping during the Spanish Civil War. “I am the son not of my mother,” he said in a 2006 interview, “but of the civil war, its messianism, its hatred.” Goytisolo spent most of his adult life in Paris and Morocco, and his work was banned in Spain until the 1975 death of General Francisco Franco. His last novel, published in 2008, was titled Exiled from Almost Everywhere. He won the Miguel de Cervantes Prize in 2014, three years before his death. “Rereading is fascinating,” he told The White Review in 2014. “I say that a literary work calls to be reread, which is why I’ve always looked for the greatest number of rereaders rather than the greatest number of readers.”