Juan Goytisolo

Juan Goytisolo was a Spanish novelist, essayist, and intellectual born in 1931 in Barcelona. He is widely considered the greatest Spanish novelist of the postwar generation and one of the most important European writers of the twentieth century. His early rejection of Francoist Spain led him to exile in Paris and Marrakesh, where he spent most of his adult life. Goytisolo's fiction underwent a radical transformation in the 1960s, when he abandoned realism for formally experimental, politically charged novels that attacked the myths of Spanish identity. His Mendiola Trilogy — Señas de identidad (1966), Reivindicación del conde don Julián (1970), and Juan sin tierra (1975) — is considered one of the major achievements of the Spanish novel. His relationship with Arab culture, Islam, and the Moroccan world deeply shaped his mature work, which constantly interrogated the colonial, religious, and literary assumptions embedded in Castilian Spanish culture. He received the Premio Cervantes in 2014, the highest recognition in Spanish-language literature. Goytisolo also wrote important essays and memoirs, including the two-volume autobiography Coto vedado (1985) and En los reinos de taifa (1986). He died in Marrakesh in 2017.