Spanish writer Miguel Delibes dies at 89
Miguel Delibes, one of Spain’s top novelists whose works portrayed
the country’s upheavals following its 1936-39 civil war, died Friday
after a lengthy battle with colon cancer. He was 89.
Delibes, a former journalist whose works have been translated into
some 30 languages, died at his home in the central city of Valladolid
where he was born in 1920, public radio RNE reported citing his family.
“We must remember him as a good person and a great writer,” Education
Minister Angel Gabilondo told the radio station, adding the author had a
“passion” for writing.
Delibes was operated on for colon cancer in 1998 shortly after he
published his last novel “El Hereje” (“The Heretic”), an international
bestseller that follows the life of a boy born on the day the Protestant
reformation began.
“I am forgetting what I wrote. The same day that I submitted ‘The
Heretic’ to publishers I was diagnosed with colon cancer. Since then the
only thing I have dealt with has been my health,” the online edition of
daily newspaper El Mundo quoted him as saying at the time.
A prolific writer who published about 70 books including novels,
short stories and collections of articles, essays and travel chronicles,
he received Spain’s highest honour for literature, the Miguel de
Cervantes Prize, in 1993.
AFP |