Federico Garcia Lorca
Federico García Lorca was Spain's greatest twentieth-century poet and dramatist, murdered by Nationalist forces at the start of the Civil War. Born in Fuente Vaqueros near Granada in 1898 to a prosperous landowner and a schoolteacher, he was a gifted pianist before he was a writer, and his verse retained a musician's ear. At the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid from 1919 he formed intense friendships with Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel, part of the group later called the Generation of '27, which reconnected Spanish poetry with its baroque past and with European modernism. Romancero gitano in 1928 made him famous, taking the ballad form and Andalusian Roma subjects and charging them with violence, sexuality and fate. Its success embarrassed him, and Dalí and Buñuel attacked it as provincial. He travelled to New York in 1929-30, and Poeta en Nueva York, published after his death, is a surrealist work of revulsion at the city's capitalism and its treatment of black Americans. Under the Second Republic he directed La Barraca, a state-funded travelling theatre that took classic Spanish plays to villages. His mature drama — Blood Wedding in 1933, Yerma in 1934 and The House of Bernarda Alba, finished weeks before his death — deals with women confined by honour, sterility and repression in rural Spain. He was homosexual, which he could not state publicly, and his politics were of the left. He went home to Granada in the summer of 1936. After the rising began he was arrested and shot near Alfacar on or around 18 August, probably with a schoolmaster and two bullfighters. His body has never been found.
- Lived: 1898 CE – 1936 CE
- Nationality: Spanish
- Roles: poet, playwright
