Camilo Jose Cela's breakthrough novel, The Family of Pascual Duarte, was published first in Argentina and not in his native Spain.
The book was deemed too violent and crude for the Spain of the 1940s, which was in the early stages of General Franco's long dictatorship.
It is now often cited as having breathed new life into Spanish literature in the years immediately following the bloody 1936-39 civil war.
The novel owed its freshness in part to the unusually straightforward language Cela used to tell the tale of a rural, uneducated man who commits a series of brutal murders without really knowing why and ends up being executed.
Key works |
The Family of Pascual Duarte The Hive San Camilo Journey to the Alcarria Jews, Moors and Christians The Windmill and Other Short Fiction The Secret Dictionary |
Cela's subject matter would also have struck Spanish readers as original - though its darkness reflected wider European literary developments of the day.
Another well known work, The Hive, published in 1951, takes place in the cold, depressing post-war years and tells the story of starving writers who sit for hours during the winter in Madrid's literary cafes.
Over his lifetime, Cela produced more than 70 works, including essays, poems and travel books, and 10 novels.
The son of a Spanish father and English mother, Cela was born in 1916 in comfortable surroundings in the town of Iria de Flavia, in the north-western region of Galicia.
He was recruited as a private to fight on the side of the rebel forces led by the future dictator - another native of Galicia - but received serious wounds.
 Cela won the Cervantes prize in 1995 |
Cela later published an anti-fascist magazine that became a forum for opposition to the 36-year Franco dictatorship.
He befriended the American writer Ernest Hemingway, whom he described as a great influence.
In 1989, after winning the Nobel Prize, he was asked how he would like to be remembered.
Using the crude language common to his fiction, Cela said he would like this epitaph: "Here lies someone who tried to screw his fellow man as little as possible."
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