Ана Мария Матуте: Жизнь и творчество испанской писательницы

Spanish author

Ana María Matute Ausejo (26 July 1925 – 25 June 2014) was an internationally acclaimed Spanish writer and member of the Real Academia Española. In 1959, she received the Premio Nadal for Primera memoria. The third woman to receive the Cervantes Prize for her literary oeuvre, she is considered one of the foremost novelists of the posguerra, the period immediately following the Spanish Civil War.

Matute was born on 26 July 1925. Matute was ten years old when the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, and this internecine conflict is said to have had the greatest impact on Matute's writing. She considered not only "the battles between the two factions, but also the internal aggression within each side". Following the Nationalist victory in 1939, Francisco Franco established a military dictatorship, which lasted thirty six years until his death in 1975. Since Matute matured as a writer in this posguerra period under the dictatorship, some of the most recurrent themes in her works are violence, alienation, misery, and especially the loss of innocence. At least once she was fined because of her writings. She published her first story, The Boy Next Door, when she was only 17 years old. She was outspoken about subjects such as the benefits of emotional suffering, the constant changing of a human being, and how innocence is never completely lost. Matute was a university professor. She studied at the international school at Hilversum, Netherlands, and traveled to various countries as a lecturer or guest instructor. Her academic work in the United States spanned four decades, beginning as early as 1966 when she spoke at Our Lady of Cincinnati College. She lectured at the Tatem Arts Center of Hood College in Maryland on 28 April 1969. She was invited to speak at Brigham Young University in Utah on 12 March 1990, where she gave a lecture on Working the Craft of Translation in Spanish. She was also a guest lecturer at the universities of Oklahoma, Indiana and Virginia. She was an honorary member of the Hispanic Society of America and a member of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese. She won the Premio Nadal in 1958 for the first novel of the trilogy, Los Mercaderes.

On 25 June 2014, Matute died of a heart attack at the age of 88, and was laid to rest in the Cemetery of Montjuïc, Barcelona.

The Hispanic Division, located at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, has a special recording of Ana María Matute herself reading from her prose work Algunos muchachos. Recorded on 5 May 2000, this Spanish author recorded her reading of this work in Spanish at the Library of Congress. The recording of Matute herself is located in the Archive of Hispanic Literature, which can be located online. Contents include from Algunos muchachos: "Prologue" (2:54); "El rey de los zennos I" (min. 4:13); II (min 14:21); III (min. 28:31).