A writer with a long and personal career in contemporary Spanish narrative, also a writer of poetry, drama and essays, Carmen Martín Gaite was born in Salamanca on the 8th December 1925. She spent the first years of her youth in her home town, studying at high school and graduating in Romance Philology with the extraordinary graduation prize.

Among her classmates were the writers Agustín García Calvo and Ignacio Aldecoa, who introduced her into Madrid literary circles when, in 1950, she decided to move to the Spanish capital.

In Madrid she came into contact with the group of young writers formed by Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio - whom she would marry in 1953 -, Ignacio Aldecoa, Jesús Fernández Santos, Josefina Rodríguez, Alfonso Sastre, Medardo Fraile and others. Her friendship with this group, known as the 1950 Generation, was the decisive factor for her to abandon her plans to teach at university, which she had when she left Salamanca, and dedicate herself entirely to literature.

She thus began a literary career in the early Fifties, at the same time contributing to newspapers and journals of the time such as "Clavileño", "Alcalá", "La estafeta literaria", "ABC", "Blanco y Negro" or "Revista Española", founded in 1953 by Antonio Rodríguez Moñino and run by her friends Alfonso Sastre, Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio and Ignacio Aldecoa.

In 1955 she published her novel "El balneario", with which she won the "Café Gijón" Prize for short novels, and in 1958 she received the Nadal Prize for her first long novel, "Entre visillos". These two awards were to be a powerful boost for her career as a writer.

The work of Martín Gaite has taken shape, over time, as a bridge between the realism of the mid-century and the more intimate style of the modern-day novel. Her work pays special attention to the problems of Spanish women in all periods.

The themes which are recurrent in all her novels, revolve around the conflicts between reality and dream, how things are interpreted in daily life and what is desired in secret, in solitude, of one´s hopes.

In her early works there was a tendency towards realistic criticism, aimed at monotony, conventions, social injustice and the insensitivity of many sectors of society, reflecting especially on provincial life and the situation of her own sex, a focus which she would later abandon to concentrate on a more ambitious type of narrative: the passage of time, fantasy, random chance, the sempiternal search for the interlocutor.

In 1972 after a long phase away from university, she gained her doctorate from Madrid with the thesis "Lenguaje y estilos amorosos en los textos del siglo XVIII español," under the guidance of Alonso Zamora Vicente, and which was to win the Extraordinary Doctorate Prize. Despite this, she has continued to work in teaching only sporadically in foreign universities.

In 1978 she won the National Literature Prize for her novel "El cuarto de atrás". Before that, she had published the book of short stories "Las ataduras" (Barcelona, 1960) and the novels "Ritmo lento" (Barcelona, 1963), "Retahílas" (barcelona, 1973) and "Fragmentos de interior" (Barcelona, 1976). The publication of all her short stories in the collection "Cuentos completos" (Madrid, 1979) and the fantasy tales "El castillo de las tres murallas" (Barcelona, 1981) was still to come.

Martín Gaite is also a writer of poetry ("A rachas", 1977), drama ("A palo seco", 1987), film and television scripts, and essays: "Usos amorosos de la posguerra española" (Anagrama Essay Prize, 1987), "La búsqueda del interlocutor y otras búsquedas" (Madrid, 1974), and "El cuento de nunca acabar" (Madrid, 1983).

She has translated Ignacio Silone, Italo Svevo, Eça de Queiroz, Flaubert, Perrault, Virginia Woolf, Emily Brönte and William Carlos Williams into Spanish and has also prepared critical editions of various authors.