Writer, member of the Royal Spanish Academy and Nobel Prizewinner for Literature, Camilo José Cela was born in Iria Flavia, La Coruña, on the 11th May 1916, to a Spanish father and English mother. At eleven years of age his family moved to Madrid. At twenty he wrote his first book of verse, "Pisando la dudosa luz del día".

He started three university degrees, finishing none of them - medicine, philosophy and law - and declares himself proud to have had teachers such as Pedro Salinas. Now, he is a doctor "honoris causa" of more than twelve universities.

Cela´s first prose work, "La familia de Pascual Duarte", was published in 1942 a was at that time a genuine literary scandal, marking a permanent milestone in Spanish literature which made the author into the most important Spanish writer of post-war Spain. With the passage of the years it has become the most widely translated Spanish book since "Don Quixote."

He later wrote "Pabellón de reposo" (1943), a work marked by lyrical existentialism and inspired by his time in a tuberculosis sanatorium, and "Nuevas andanzas y desventuras del Lazarillo de Tormes" (1944), a witty updating of the Spanish classic of picaresque literature.

Cela reaped another great success in 1951 with "La colmena", a novel which describes life in Madrid during the first, sad years after the Civil War. More than three hundred characters parade over its pages, connected by the common denominator of distressing mediocrity.

This is followed by "Mrs Caldwell habla con su hijo" (1953), "La catira" (1955), with which he won the Critics´ Prize, "Tobogán de hambrientos" (1962), "Izas, rabizas y colipoterras" (1964), "Nuevas escenas matritenses" (1966) and "San Camilo 1936" (1969). In 1973 he published "Oficio de tinieblas, 5", his most experimental and obscure work.

He has been a member of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language, which he entered giving a lecture on the literary work of the painter, Solana, and in 1977 he was appointed Senator by royal resignation in the first "Cortes" (parliament) of the democracy.

With "Mazurca para dos muertos" he won the National Literature Prize in 1986. "Cristo versus Arizona", published in 1988 is an epic poem, in sarcastic, terrible, hard prose. New books are "El asesinato del perdedor" y "La cruz de San Andrés" (Planeta Prize), both written in 1994, and "Madera de Boj".

Cela has also written admirable travel books, in which he has produced passages of vigourous picturesqueness and telling descriptions of landscapes, places and individuals. Among these are "Viaje a la Alcarria (1948), "Del Miño al Bidasoa" (1952), "Cristianos, moros y judíos" (1956), "Primer viaje andaluz" (1959) and "Viaje al Pirineo de Lérida" (1965).

"La familia de Pascual Duarte" and "La colmena" have been made into films, the former directed by Ricardo Franco and the latter by Mario Camus.

The master of an inimitable style, classic and modern at once, Cela has created a rich work of great importance, with daring, violence and confidence, yet full of compassion and human warmth. He has renewed and revitalised the Spanish language, perhaps like no other this century, and stand without doubt among the great creators in Spanish, together with Cervantes, Góngora, Quevedo, Valle-Inclán or Lorca.

In 1989 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature "for being the most outstanding figure of Spain´s literary renewal, and for his rich, intense prose, which with controlled passion paints a provoking vision of the helplessness of the human being." Since then has come a string of tributes and displays of recognition of someone who is by now the most universal of Spain´s contemporary writers.