Almudena Grandes, an "award-winning Spanish writer and ardent feminist who shot to fame with an erotic novel about a woman rebelling against social norms," died November 27, the New York Times reported. She was 61. Grandes wrote more than a dozen novels, featuring protagonists who "mostly live on the edges of traditional Spanish society, either struggling against its sexual restrictions or marginalized by poverty. She was also a left-wing activist who had set about writing a six-novel series focused on Spain in the aftermath of its civil war of the 1930s. She completed five volumes."
"We lost one of the most important writers of our time," Pedro Sánchez, Spain's Socialist prime minister said on Twitter. "Committed and brave, she narrated our recent history from a progressive point of view."
Grandes's breakthrough came in 1989 with the publication of Las Edades de Lulú (The Ages of Lulu), which "won a literary prize for erotic fiction, sold more than a million copies worldwide and was turned into a movie by the director Bigas Luna, with a cast that included Javier Bardem, the Oscar-winning Spanish actor, in his first screen appearance," the Times wrote. Her other books include Malena es un Nombre de Tango (Malena Is the Name of a Tango) and Los Aires Difíciles (The Wind From the East), both of which were adapted into films.
Several of Grandes's novels are set during the Franco dictatorship. The Times noted that one of her more recent bestsellers in Spain, 2017's El Corazón Helado (The Frozen Heart), "starts with the funeral of a powerful businessman, attended by a mysterious woman, during which an inheritance of money and documents comes to light and helps unravel a troubled family saga dating back to the ravages of the Spanish Civil War."
After the success of The Frozen Heart, Grandes started her six-novel series, calling the project Episodios de una Guerra Interminable (Episodes in an Interminable War). The first book, Inés y la alegría (Inés and Happiness), was published in 2010 and won three literary prizes. Last year, the fourth installment, Los pacientes del doctor García (The Patients of Doctor García), won the Jean Monnet Prize for European Literature, as well as the National Prize for Narrative, awarded by the Spanish culture ministry. Her last published novel was the fifth installment in the series, La madre de Frankenstein (The Mother of Frankenstein), released in 2020.
Her husband, poet Luis García Montero, said Grandes had most recently been working on a novel (not the final installment in her series) that he called "an allegory of the future," dealing with a society that is struggling to maintain individual rights and freedoms after being assaulted by a pandemic, the Times wrote.