JUAN GOYTISOLO(4 books)

Juan Goytisolo was born in Barcelona in l931. From his earliest days, his life has been marked by the effects of the Spanish Civil War; his mother was killed in a Francoist air-raid in l938 and his father was imprisoned.

Although now widely recognised as Spain's greatest living writer, he claims to detest Spanish life and society and lives in Marrakesh, from where he writes scathing pieces about his homeland. Bisexual, he was married to the novelist Monique Lange, with whom he lived in France. When she died in 1996 he moved to Morocco, and is a great admirer and scholar of Arab and Mahgrebi life and culture. For many years he had a difficult relationship with Spain, but he is now fully accepted, as his presentation with Spain's National Prize for Literature in 2009 shows.

Goytisolo's task, as he sees it, has been to reinvigorate Spanish fiction by adulterating, or "poisoning", it with the range of influences that he has brought to bear on all that he regards as ossified and conservative. His luminous 2000 novel, The Garden of Secrets, is based loosely on the life of one Eusebio, a poet, and is a perfect example of how Goytisolo subverts Spanish conservatism, from racial attitudes to sexual repression, in every possible way. Count Julian (1974) is a deliberate attempt to take up the cause of the historical character of that name, in Spanish eyes a notorious traitor who opened the country to Islamic invasion. In his own words, Goytisolo imagines "the destruction of Spanish mythology, its Catholicism and nationalism, in a literary attack on traditional Spain."

His writing, as his friend Carlos Fuentes says, is about "exiles condemned to live with the language of their oppressions, digest it, expel it, trample on it, and then resign themselves ... "

He is one of the major European writers alive today.