Juan Goytisolo

Juan Goytisolo is a Spanish poet and novelist. He is openly gay and has rejected his home country of Spain, which he sees as over decadent and sexually repressed. He currently lives in voluntary exile in Marrakesh.

Juan Goytisolo was born in Barcelona in 1931. His father was imprisoned by the Republican government during the civil war, while his Catalan mother was killed in the first Francoist air raid in 1938. After law studies, he published his first novel, The Young Assassins, in 1954. His deep opposition to Franco led him into exile in Paris in 1956, where he worked as a reader for Gallimard. Breaking with the realism of his earlier novels, he published Marks of Identity (1966) and Juan the Landless (1975). Like all his works, they were banned in Spain until Franco's death. Juan Goytisolo was married to the publisher Monique Lange, who died in 1996. After her death, he is noted as saying their once shared Paris apartment felt like a tomb. He then moved to Marrakesh where he has lived since 1997.

External link

• Official Page (Spanish)
• Scourge of the New Spain, an article on Goytisolo from The Guardian
• Interview with Goytisolo from the Center for Book Culture
• Goytisolo at the Complete Review – bibliography, evaluation, and links