July 19, 2020
The Spanish writer Juan Marsé is dead. The Catalan is aged late on Saturday evening 87 years The agent of the author, Carmen Balcells, died in his house in Barcelona on Sunday in the Catalan capital. Marsé was considered one of the greatest Spanish narrators of the present and has repeatedly been considered an outsider candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature. In addition to many other awards, the author of "Last Days with Teresa" also received the prestigious Spanish Cervantes Prize in 2008. When he was asked, twelve years ago, how he would prepare for the handover of the Cervantes Prize by the then King Juan Carlos, he replied: "To be honest, I will definitely spend a lot of time tying my tie. I can do it never". After the ceremony, he complained that he had to wear a tailcoat. "I looked like a penguin." The self-taught wrote his first novel during his military service. In the early 1960s, the opponent of the dictator Francisco Franco's regime moved to Paris for four years, where he met with Spanish communists. During the dictatorship, his works were censored, so Marsé had to publish them temporarily in Mexico. He was never interested in politics. "I am only a narrator," the novelist emphasized again and again.
Source: DPA
