Spanish Novelist Cela Wins Literature Nobel

Spanish novelist and essayist Camilo Jose Cela, who used the horrors of the Spanish Civil War to infuse his work with an often grotesque and violent imagery, today won the Nobel Prize in literature.

Cela, 73, was cited by the Swedish Academy for his “rich and intensive prose, which with restrained compassion forms a challenging vision of man’s vulnerability.”

Cela said he believes that he shares the award with many other Spanish and Latin American writers.

“For me, this is something I’m very proud of,” Cela said from his home in Guadalajara. “I offer it to all of literature in Spanish. I believe that other authors, Spanish and Latin American, who write in Spanish could also have won it for the same reasons as I, but, in the end, I won it, and I’m very, very happy.”

Cela’s best known work is the 1942 novel “The Family of Pascual Duarte,” in which he created a new literary style known as tremendismo, emphasizing violence and grotesque imagery.

The novel, a first-person account of a murderer awaiting execution, was banned in Spain but established Cela’s reputation as a writer. It was considered the most important postwar novel and set a new direction for Spanish literature toward concise and sober writing.

“The Family of Pascual Duarte” is probably the most widely read Spanish novel since “Don Quixote,” the Academy said. It also singled out as “a sensation” his 1969 novel “San Camilo,” which describes the weeks before the outbreak of civil war.

Cela’s masterpiece is considered “The Hive,” from 1951, which captures three days in the life of Madrid four years after the civil war.

Cela has written 10 novels among his 70 works of travelogues, short stories and poetry.

He was born May 11, 1916, in the town of Iria Flavia to a middle-class family that counted among its forebears both Spanish aristocrats and English pirates.

His medical studies were interrupted by the 1936-39 Civil War. Suffering from pulmonary tuberculosis, he returned to his native Galicia district, which was controlled by Gen. Francisco Franco’s Nationalists. Forced to join the Nationalists as a private, he was seriously wounded.

The Swedish Academy called him “the leading figure in Spain’s literary renewal during the postwar era.”

“Cela is a restless spirit” who often expresses himself “in an old Spanish tradition of hilarious grotesqueness,” it said.

Sture Allen, the Academy’s secretary, called Cela “provocative and innovative” in both his form and subject matter.

He is the first Spaniard to win the Nobel since 1977, when it was awarded to poet Vicente Aleixandre. Cela was chosen from about 150 candidates, Allen said. The prize this year is worth about $463,000.