The grand old man of Spanish literature, novelist Camilo Jose Cela, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature this week, is an outspoken and irreverent observer of human life noted for his use of a direct and colloquial style.
"I don't believe in fashions, schools or trends, nor in the bureaucracy of literature," Cela, 73, once said. "I insist that I limited myself to reflecting the reality that I saw."His novels paint a bleak but not unsympathetic picture of reality expressed in a familiar style close to everyday speech.
"The Family of Pascual Duarte," his first novel published in 1942, was hailed as a landmark in the barren years of Spain's literary production that followed the victory of right-wing dictator Francisco Franco in the 1936-39 civil war.
It is the bluntly told story of a Spanish peasant unable to suppress a killer's instinct instilled in him by a hostile environment. The novel's frankness attracted the attention of the Francoist censors, and the book was at first banned.
His later work "The Beehive" (1951) unveils the seething misery of post-civil war Madrid where a swarm of ill-defined figures inter-relate in a world of cruelty and indifference.
Both of these novels have been translated into several languages and were also produced as films in Spain.
Born on May 11, 1916, in Padron, northwest Spain, the son of a Spanish father and English mother, Cela studied medicine, philosophy and law in Madrid and served with Franco's forces in the war.
Cela tried his hand at a variety of occupations - bullfighter, civil servant, painter, actor - before finally dedicating himself to literature.
Despite his brushes with Franco's censorship, Cela himself briefly worked as a censor supervising an orphan's school bulletin, a pharmaceutical journal and a religious magazine.
His works include several Spanish travelogues that stand apart from his novels through their freshness and humor.
Cela became a member of the Academy of the Spanish Language in 1957 and has been mentioned for several years as a possible winner of the Nobel literature prize despite his own skepticism about literary awards.
Major literary prizes eluded him until 1984, when he won Spain's national literature prize for his latest work, the 1983 novel "Mazurka for Two Dead Men."
"San Camilo, 1936" (written in 1969), a novel set in the civil war, and "Mazurka," set in his native rural Galicia soon after the war, show some variations in style from his earlier writings but little change in their basic theme.
"Man is the common denominator," Cela says.
His view of life was not unremittingly bleak, and his novels convey a touch of tenderness for the poor and underprivileged, often depicting with sympathy those on the fringes of society such as prostitutes, the poor and fools.
He has always believed in the artist as iconoclast. "I think the writer should always be a great loner, a sniper," he once told a magazine interviewer.
But, writing always in longhand because he never learned to type, Cela is wary of over-analysis of literature.
"I once spent a minute and a half answering questions at a conference because I couldn't think what to say when they asked me what I had meant when I wrote such and such," he said.
He is married with one son, but in recent years has lived in a village near Madrid with another woman companion.