Mazurka for Two Dead Men

Camilo José Cela, winner of the 1989 Nobel Prize for Literature, was born in 1916 in Galicia in a family with aristocratic roots. His father was a Spaniard, his mother of English birth but also with some Italian blood. His medical studies were interrupted due to the civil war, after which he returned to Madrid to study law. In 1942, he published the novel that made his name, La familia de Pascual Duarte. Since then he has devoted himself entirely to literature. He lived on Mallorca for decades, starting in 1954. In 1956 and until 1979, he published the magazine, Papeles de Son Armadans in which, during the Franco era, he could give space to the young opposition. He died in 2001.

"Cela never forgets that the mazurka is a dance. He writes with gusto about that fundamental two-step of human existence: sex and death."