Spanish Writer Cela Wins Nobel Prize : Literature: The author, whose works have painted a picture of his homeland, says of the award, ‘Life is like a game of tennis, and this time I won.’

Camilo Jose Cela, a Spanish writer whose violent, grotesque images sprang from his nation’s civil war that killed more than 1 million of his countrymen, won the Nobel Prize for Literature on Thursday.

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

It said his novel “The Family of Pascual Duarte,” published in 1942, was the most popular work of fiction in Spanish since Miguel Cervantes’ masterpiece “Don Quixote” was published nearly 400 years ago.

“I understand that this is the culmination of my literary career after many years of work,” Cela told Swedish Radio from his home in Guadalajara, 30 miles northeast of Madrid. “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.”

Cela, a bon vivant known in Spain for his flamboyant life style, told reporters over lunch in Madrid that “life is like a game of tennis, and this time I won.”

He said he will use the $463,000 prize “to pay my debts, and believe me, I’ve got a lot of them.”

In the 47 years since “Pascual Duarte,” Cela said, “what I have gained in wisdom I’ve been losing in vigor and health, and what I have gained in experience I’ve lost in freshness.”

As an epitaph, he said, he would like: “Here lies someone who tried to screw his fellow man as little as possible.”

His 10 novels and 60 other works--short stories, essays, poetry and travel books--have made Cela “the leading figure in Spain’s literary renewal during the postwar era,” the Swedish Academy said. He is the fifth Spanish writer to receive the literature prize.

Sture Allen, the academy’s secretary, said Cela also had wide influence on literature throughout Latin America.

“He is an experimental and provocative writer, both regarding form and contents,” Allen said. “Furthermore, he broadened the range of the Spanish language.”

Asked to compare Cela with another experimental Spanish writer, Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru, Allen described both as individualists who were “apparently acquainted with each others’ works.”

Allen suggested that readers unfamiliar with Cela begin with travel writings in which “he tried to capture the Spain he saw disappearing, and maybe some of the Spanish national spirit.”

In “The Family of Pascual Duarte,” his best-known work, Cela created a new style known as tremendismo that emphasizes 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.

“Requiem of Darkness 5” (1973) and “Mazurka for Two Dead” (1983) carried Cela’s experimental style further. His masterpiece is considered to be “The Hive,” published in 1951. It describes three days in the life of Madrid four years after the civil war ended in 1939.

The war, which lasted three years and brought Gen. Francisco Franco to power, often plays an important role in Cela’s works.

Cela was born May 11, 1916, in the northwestern city of Ira Flavia in the Galicia region to a middle-class family that counted among its forebears both Spanish aristocrats and English pirates.

At age 9, Cela and his family moved to Madrid. He later studied medicine and law before being recruited by the Fascists, suffered the horrors of war and was sent home with serious wounds.

Despite his service in the Franco forces, Cela was strongly anti-Fascist. From 1956 to 1979, he published a magazine that became a forum for the young opposition.

In 1977, King Juan Carlos appointed Cela to a Senate seat in the first post-Franco Parliament, and he participated the next year in writing a new constitution. He received the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature in 1987 and has been a member of the Spanish Academy literary group since 1957.

Cela is the first Spaniard to win the literature prize since the poet Vicente Aleixandre in 1977 and the first Spanish-language writer to win since Gabriel Garcia Marquez of Colombia in 1982. The other winners from Spain were poet Juan Ramon Jimenez in 1956 and playwrights Jose Echegaray and Jacinto Benavente in 1904 and 1922.