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Juan Goytisolo's 72 years of life cover many of the horrors
and some of the delights of 20th-century history and literature. He has
published over 30 books of fiction, essays and journalism.
Born in Barcelona in 1931, Goytisolo lived through terrible times as a
child. In 1938, his mother died in an air raid by Italian bombers during
the Spanish Civil War. "My family was destroyed by the Civil War;
my mother was one of 800 civilians who died from terrorist bombardments
in 1938. It was preparation for the horrors of world war to come."
His conservative Basque father packed him off to a repressive religious
school and then to Madrid to study law. Francoist repression
hit Catalonia particularly hard. "The Catalan language was banned
and even at home my father forbade us to speak it. When I started writing
it was impossible to get published because of the censorship."
By the 1950s, he had escaped to the literary world of Paris - a city of
revolutionary existentialist ideas and the possibility of political and
social change.
It was at the famous Gallimard publishing house in Paris that he met the
love of his life and his wife of nearly 40 years, Monique Lange, and where
he crossed swords with some of the creative literary giants of the era
- Sartre, Camus and Genet.
"Monique was a close friend of Jean Genet, and he had an important
influence on my life. My personal life was very different to his but we
both rebelled against middle-class morality."
Most non-Latin men could never understand his attitude to sex. He was
happily married yet attracted
to Arab men and sees sex with men as perfectly natural:
"I don't have identities. I always say that in my life I didn't go
to bed with homosexuals,
