Regents' Lecturer

As a novelist and essay-writer, Juan Goytisolo has been the most important figure in Spanish literature and culture for the last thirty years. In fact, along with Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez y Mario Vargas Llosa, he is one of the five most influential and most internationally recognized figures of the Spanish-speaking world. At the same time, he is very critical of the Spanish cultural and literary establishment. He is both a very respected and a polemical figure. Defender of oppressed and marginal people always and everywhere, he is currently the most original writer and the most polemical figure in Spanish culture. Very well known especially in North Africa, Latin America, and Europe, his work has been translated into many languages. His most influential books are:

Essays:

• Problemas de la novela (1959). This was one of the theoretical guides for what is called in Spain "The Generation of Half the Century".

• El furgon de cola (1967). This was the first book of its era to assert the need for a change in Spanish literature. Goytisolo was one of the main representatives of the "social novel" at the beginning of the 60s and he was also one of the leaders of the revolutionary changes that drove Spanish literature of the 70s into a more experimental stage.

• His vitality and capacity for change continues to challenge critics as well as readers. More recent essay-books are:

• Novels:

• Autobiography:

• Travel books: In the last thirty years he has lived in voluntary exile outside of Spain, mostly in Paris and Marrakech (Morocco). He is one of the strongest defenders of Muslim culture and civilization in Europe, and he has written different essays and books vindicating the contributions of Muslim culture to European culture. He is also concerned with the preservation of oral literature in Morocco. Partially because of his efforts, Marrakechís main square has been declared by the UNESCO "Oral Patrimony of the Humanity". He speaks several foreign languages, including Arabic, English, and French. He has traveled extensively, and he has published several books of his impressions. Some of his travels have had political reasons, as those to Algeria, Chechnya, and Sarajevo, where he collaborated with Susan Sonntag.

• In 1992 Goytisolo received the European Community's Prize (which is awarded once every two years) for Most Distinguished European Writer.

• Juan Goytisolo's Problemas de la novela was the most influential study in the definition of the characteristics of the so-called "novela social,î the dominant literary movement in Spain during the 1950s and the 1960s. Goytisolo's novels of those years put his theory in practice and are now considered to be among the best and most representative novels of that movement. On the other hand, Goytisolo's essays of El furgon de cola at the end of the 1960s were the first serious attempt to analyze the changes that the Franco's regime had introduced into Spain and to propose the need to adapt literary themes and styles to this new situation. His novels Senas de identidad, La traicion del conde don Julian, and Juan sin tierra, among others, offer a reflection on the paradox of a country which was being modernized by the very supporters of traditional Spanish values. His lucid and defiant analysis of Spanish reality was decisive for the configuration of the Spanish literature of the 1970s and 1980s, initiating a more experimental way of writing, which to a great extent continues today. Additionally, his confessional style and his honesty in the treatment of even the most scabrous themes, as well as his heterodoxy and his courage to denounce the presumptuousness and nepotism of Spanish culture, has made him one of the most respected voices (and of course one of the most hated by the establishment) in contemporary Spain.