Camilo José Cela

Cela grew up in Galicia, the son of a Spanish father and part-English mother, and abandoned law and medicine studies in Madrid for literature. He fought on Franco's Nationalist side during the Spanish Civil War, was wounded, and spent much of the following decades inside the regime he'd fought for, working at times as a state censor while publishing fiction the same censors sometimes blocked.

The Family of Pascual Duarte (1942), a peasant's flat confession of murder, launched tremendismo, a literature of unflinching cruelty. The Hive (1951), a mosaic of postwar Madrid poverty, had to be published in Argentina to dodge Spanish censorship entirely. Cela founded the literary review Papeles de Son Armadans in Majorca, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1989, by then Spain's most decorated man of letters. He died in Madrid in 2002.