The first Spanish novelist to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, Camilo José Cela was born in May 1916 in the hamlet of Iria Flavia, Galicia, to a middle-class family of Galician, British, and Italian stock. In 1925 the family moved to Madrid where, subsequently, the young Cela pursued various university courses, including medicine, law, and literature. Twelve months after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, and with Madrid under siege, he left the capital in July 1937 in order to join General Franco’s army. Although before the war Cela had published a little poetry, his literary career began in earnest with the appearance of his first novel in 1942. In the next twenty years Cela’s fiction and travel writing established him as the leading Spanish writer of the post-war period,…
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Citation: Henn, David. "Camilo José Cela". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 01 October 2009 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=11999, accessed 24 November 2024.]
