Carmen Martín Gaite

Martín Gaite trained as a philologist, writing her doctoral thesis on eighteenth-century Spanish courtship customs, before becoming one of the leading voices of the generation of Spanish women writers who came after Laforet. She wrote steadily through the Franco years in essays, children's books, and fiction, developing a style alert to the small domestic silences censorship imposed on women's lives.

The Back Room (1978), published just three years after Franco's death, won Spain's National Narrative Prize; its midnight interview with a mysterious visitor unspools into memory and fantasy, using metafictional play to recover an interior history the dictatorship had suppressed for decades.

She continued writing and translating until her death in Madrid in 2000.