El pais semanal almudena grandes

the three weddings of manolita

Manuel Jabois|01 Dec 2021 – 04:00UTC “You can’t fight a war when you’re in such a bad way. How can you fight when you’re in a bad way?”, said Hitchens before dying of cancerSofía Ruiz de Velasco|01 Dec 2021 – 04:00UTCfrom the discourse of contempt for what happens in social networks, collective mourning is branded as frivolous and perfunctory. It is notEl País|Madrid|30 Nov 2021 – 15:17CUTThe Council of Ministers recognizes her “extraordinary quality as a writer, endorsed by numerous awards since the beginning of her career”.

the weekly

It was last October 21, through an article in El País Semanal, where Almudena Grandes wrote regularly, that we learned of her illness. “I will continue to be here, writing an article on this same page every two weeks, and on the back page of the newspaper every Monday. That space, sacred to me, because it allows me to keep in touch with my readers in any circumstance, will allow us to meet, to know about each other, to stay together,” she wrote in her article entitled Tirar una valla.

atlas of human geography

Grandes did not miss the opportunity to remember her thousands of readers, she who has been one of this country’s bestsellers. “My readers, who know me well, know that they are very important to me. Whenever I am asked about them I always answer the same thing, that they are my freedom, because thanks to their support I can write the books I want to write myself, and not the ones others expect me to write. They also know that writing is my life, and it has never been so much, nor so intensely as it is now.”

In 1991 she published Te llamaré viernes, a love story between two characters trying to survive loneliness in Madrid, and in 1994 Malena es un nombre de tango, the novel that definitively consecrated her and opened her path as a popular author as well as a literary one, with which she conquered hundreds of thousands of readers.

Atlas de geografía humana, published in 1998 and which gives voice to four women who tell their own stories in the midst of the passage to maturity, became a new massive success, and Los aires difíciles (2002), with two main characters who settle on the coast of Cadiz to restart their lives, was her literary encounter with a landscape that was very dear to her. Her house in Rota, where she and Luis García Montero were frequent hosts to a large group of friends, many of them writers, was one of the central places in her life, where she spent long summers and to which the family escaped whenever they could.

inés and joy

Grandes explained that when she heard the news she did not want to share it because she needed to “be calm” and “get in touch with her body” and with herself. However, after not being able to attend the Madrid Book Fair as a result of an intestinal complication made her realize that her “silence had had a price” and that it was time to tell everyone how she had been feeling since she learned she had cancer.

“I already knew that I am a lucky woman because there are so many people who love me. Now I regret that some of those people have been so worried about me, for an absence that I should have explained before to save them the hard time,” said the writer. Words after which she wanted to apologize to those people.