Francisco Ayala

Spanish writer, the last representative of the Generation of '27. Critics have usually divided Ayala's work in two stages: before and after the Spanish Civil War.

During his first stage, before the Civil War, Tragicomedia de un hombre sin espíritu (Tragicomedy of a Spiritless Man, 1925) and Historia de un amanecer (A Sunrise Tale, 1926) follow a traditional narrative line. With El boxeador y el ángel (The Boxer and the Angel, 1929) and Cazador en el alba (Hunter at Dawn, 1930) he embraced avant-garde prose.

After a long silence, Ayala begun his second stage in exile with El hechizado (The Bewitched, 1944), a tale of a Creole man trying to meet King Charles II of Spain (known as the Bewitched), which became part of Los usurpadores (The Usurpers, 1949), a collection of seven narrations with the common theme of lust for power. La cabeza del cordero (The Lamb Head, 1949) is a collection of tales on the Civil War, where he pays more attention to the analysis of passions and human behaviour than to the relation of outside developments. Muertes de perro (Dog Deaths, 1958) denounced the situation of a country under a dictatorship, while presenting human degradation in a world with no values. El fondo del vaso (The Bottom of the Glass, 1962) complements his previous novel, which is commented by several characters.

He wrote his memoirs, Recuerdos y olvidos (Reminiscences and Overlooks, 1982, 1983, 1988, 2006). Francisco Ayala died in Madrid on 3 November 2009, aged 103.