Spain’s veteran poet José Manuel Caballero Bonald dies at 94

Spanish poet José Manuel Caballero Bonald, winner of Cervantes Prize of the year 2012, died at the age of 94 in Madrid.

Caballero Bonald was one of the most outstanding contemporary voices in Spanish literature and a prominent member of the Generation of the 50s with Francisco Brines, Carlos Barral, José Ángel Valente, Claudio Rodríguez, Ángel González, José Agustín Goytisolo and Jaime Gil de Biedma, wrote explica.co.

Poet, novelist and essayist, Caballero Bonald was born in Jerez de la Frontera (Cádiz) on November 11, 1926.

He published his first collection of poems, ‘Divinations,’ in 1952, after having obtained a second prize, the Adonáis Prize. Two years earlier he had won the Silversmith for Poetry.

He was a Spanish literature teacher at the National University of Colombia and at the Center for Hispanic Studies of Bryn Mawr College in the US.

His career as a novelist began with ‘Two Days of September’ (1962), which was followed by ‘Ágata’s Eye of the Cat’ (1974), ‘They Heard Birds Passing by all Night’ (1981), ‘La casa del padre’ (1988) and ‘Campo de Agramante’ (1992), which have been repeatedly reissued and translated into different languages.

He is also the author of the memoir books, ‘Time of Lost Wars’ (1995) and ‘The Habit of Living’ (2001), which is subdivided into a third part, Olvidos, postponed in a joint edition entitled, ‘La novela de la memoria’ (2010).

His complete poetic works are included in the volume, ‘We Are the Time We Have Left’. He also published various books of essays and travel chronicles and made different adaptations of classic Castilian plays.

He was president of the Spanish session of the International PEN Club, a position from which he resigned in 1981, and in 1998 he created the foundation that bears his name. In his honor, the Caballero Bonald International Essay Award was instituted in 2004.