Born in Segovia during the Civil War, of a Castilian father and Andalusian mother, he studied Teaching and Philosophy and Letters.
During the Franco regime he collaborated in the underground press of the Communist Party and was a correspondent for Radio España Independiente from 1962 to 1973. During his exile in Paris, he directed the Spanish Information publication, which was done for Spanish emigrants in Europe. In 1974 he was excluded from the Communist Party due to ideological and political differences. The censorship of Fraga Iribarne prohibited the publication of his novels in Seix Barral and New Science. Dead the Dictator, he collaborates in newspapers and publications in Spain and Europe. He was founder, president and head of Culture of the newspaper Liberación.
Awarded in 2013 with the José Luis Sampedro Prize, he has published 50 books, including novels and essays (in publishers such as Txalaparta, Libertarias, Cátedra, Muchnik, Planeta ...), and delivered more than 1,000 conferences in various cities around the world.
Speech to accept the José Luis Sampedro award
The authentic homeland of the writer is the language in which he writes. In 1945, some authors - Paul Celan, Ingeborg Bachmann, Adorno, among others - understood that their language had been sacrificed by the German genocides and bureaucrats that caused the greatest holocaust in history. They had to build a new language by purging the words that developed it.
Today, in other circumstances, that some of us are filled with anxiety and anguish, we live under the abuse, the prostitution of our own language. Goebbels' own procedures are used rather than the richness of one of the most creative languages in the world, to deliver messages and alienate citizens. Perversion of content, populist modes, alteration of meanings, words burned: each word a corpse of its pristine origin, an attempt to extinguish thought. As Celan said: «Search for the word cloud and fill the crater of silence. The inexplicable covers, in a low voice, the country ».
Many people in charge of cultural industries and politics vulgarize language, deforming it to the limits where it is impossible to recognize its meaning, its hidden music, its search for beauty. Your reason for being. And the writer must rebel against these perversions if he wants to survive and not be annihilated by this holocaust of culture. The writing must regenerate it, dignify it, purify it.
An award protected under the name of José Luis Sampedro, a man and an honest writer in the deepest Machadian stele, a writer and a man among the most honest and profound creators of our time, is, without a doubt, the best, could almost say the only prize they have given me in my life, and it comforts me and encourages me to continue fighting for the word and freedom, not only mine, but of the citizens who are intended to enslave their thinking, difference and human dignity.
