Spanish VIPs
Gloria Fuertes (1917-1998)
Gloria Fuertes is best remembered today as a writer of children’s literature, especially poetry, although she also wrote poetry and drama for a much wider audience. Her poetry collections are still to be found on children’s bookshelves and in classrooms throughout the country.
She was born in Lavapiés, Madrid in 1917 to a modest family. Her mother was a dressmaker and her father a janitor. She was able to read at three and at five she started to write her own stories. After an elementary education she attended a women’s college where she learned shorthand and typing, grammar and literature, childcare and hygiene. After losing her mother at the age of 17, she went to work in the accounts office of factory and started to write poetry. She published her first collection in 1935 and recited her work on Radio Madrid.
From 1938 to 1958 Gloria worked as a secretary whilst at the same time writing for several children’s magazines. In 1947 she won first prize in a lyrics competition run by Spanish national radio. She created two cartoon characters “Coletas y Pelines” who were very popular with children. She also published several collections of poetry for adults and in 1947 co-founded the women’s group “Versos con faldas” (Poems with Skirts).
In the late fifties she studied librarianship and English and organized the first mobile children’s library which travelled to small villages. Although she regarded herself as unschooled and self-taught, her name has been associated the literary movement called “postismo”: a generation of post-civil war writers who expressed their criticism of reality through imagery and humour. Her works deal with universal themes such as love, pain, death and loneliness using irony and metaphor which give them great musicality and flexibility. Gloria was deeply marked by the civil war and said “without the tragedy of the war I might never have written poetry”. In 1961 she won a Fulbright Scholarship to teach Spanish literature in the United States for two years at three universities. She commented that the first time she had ever set foot in a university was to teach in it.
From this time onward, Gloria Fuertes became a literary force to be reckoned with, giving lectures, recitals and publishing regularly whilst remaining in close contact with the world of children. In the seventies she worked on several children’s programmes on Spanish television and became inextricably identified by the public as a children’s poet. However, it is felt that she was never sufficiently recognized as a writer of serious literature.
Gloria Fuertes was always very discreet about her personal life, but she cut an eccentric figure in public and was assumed to be homosexual. She died of lung cancer in Madrid in 1997.