Manuel Vázquez Montalbán
Manuel Vázquez Montalbán was a prominent Spanish writer and political activist, born in Barcelona in 1939, shortly after the Spanish Civil War. Growing up in a working-class family in the barrio chino, he was influenced by leftist politics from an early age. He pursued studies at the University of Barcelona, where he became involved in anti-Franco political movements. After facing imprisonment for his activism, he turned to writing, producing poetry and essays that critiqued Spanish society and culture, notably through his collection "Croníca sentimental de España."
Vázquez Montalbán is perhaps best known for creating the character Pepe Carvalho, a hard-boiled detective featured in a successful series of mystery novels that combined elements of social commentary, humor, and culinary references. His work often defied traditional literary forms and showcased a unique blend of fiction and political critique. Throughout his career, he received several prestigious awards, including the Planeta Prize for "Los mares del Sur." He remained a vital voice in Spanish literature until his death in 2003 in Bangkok, Thailand, while returning to Spain after a lecture series.
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Subject Terms
Manuel Vázquez Montalbán
Writer
- Born: July 1, 1939
- Birthplace: Barcelona, Spain
- Died: October 18, 2003
- Place of death: Bangkok, Thailand
Biography
Manuel Vázquez Montalbán was born in Barcelona, Spain, in 1939, just months after the end of the Spanish Civil War and the start of Francisco Franco’s long and repressive rule. His parents were working class, typical residents of the barrio chino, or red-light district, which was a fertile seedbed for leftist politics. Vázquez Montalbán attended the University of Barcelona, where one of his teachers introduced him to literature by leftist authors. At that time, he joined an anti-Franco student movement and became involved with politics.
In 1960, after studying journalism in Madrid, he returned home to join the Catalan branch of the Communist Party and to marry Anna Sallés. His first job ended because he lacked the required political connections, the first of his many conflicts with Franco’s regime. In 1962, he was imprisoned for political activism, and after his release he struggled to find employment. Spurred by the birth of his son, he began writing articles for popular magazines. He published collections of his poems in the late 1960’s, and in 1969 he began teaching the history of journalism at the University of Barcelona. He published a collection of short stories satirizing Spanish politics, in 1969; two years later, he published Croníca sentimental de España, an extremely popular collection of essays examining popular culture in postwar Spain.
Vázquez Montalbán’s work during the following years demonstrated his rejection of traditional forms and the creation of new hybrid forms of fiction. He also created the character of Pepe Carvalho, a hard-boiled detective featured in a series of mystery novels. Although he wrote many more serious works during his extremely prolific career, it was the Pepe Carvalho novels, with their low-life characters, eroticism, recipes, and antibourgeois attitudes, that gained him the greatest popular success. In the series, Vázquez Montalbán used the character of Carvalho to comment on the limitations of Spanish life.
His Carvalho novel, Los mares del Sur (1979; Southern Seas, 1986), was awarded the Planeta Prize; it later won the International Prize for Crime Literature. Vázquez Montalbán also received numerous other prizes, including the Boccaccio Prize and the Raymond Chandler Prize. In 1992, he published Autobiografia del general Franco, a novel which subverted the usual elements of biography by its inclusion of a vigorous anti-Franco voice who corrects Franco’s claims about his life. In 2003, Vázquez Montalbán died of a heart attack in Bangkok, Thailand, while he was returning to Spain from a lecture series in Australia.