Isaac Montero

Although the work of the Spanish writer, journalist and screenwriter Isaac Montero was highly esteemed by literary critics, Montero did not receive widespread popular acclaim as an author in his lifetime. Fernando-Isaac Hernández Montero was born in 1936, just as Spain plunged into the bloody three-year civil war. As a boy he enjoyed
writing poetry and he became aware of his vocation as a writer as a 12-year-old, just after his father's death. When he left school Montero joined the Official School of
Journalism He also studied law and literature at university. He was always close to the underground Spanish Communist Party which suffered much from Francoist
repression, and in 1958 he helped to establish the student magazine Acento Cultural. He then worked on the international section of the Spanish national newspaper Pueblo for two years.

In the course of his literary career Montero published 18 novels. He also wrote short stories, essays and screenplays. Montero received the 1998 Critics' Prize for his novel
Ladrón de lunas (The Thief of Moons). As a dissident, Montero suffered the effects of heavy-handed Francoist censorship. He published his first full-length novel, Alrededor de un día de abril (About a Day in April), in 1966, and endured what he termed a "serious mishap". During Spain's transition to democracy in the mid-1970s,
Montero became disillusioned with the Communist Party's internal divisions and he joined the Socialist Party in 1981. He often worked with TVE, the Spanish state
television. In 1958 Montero received his first literary award, a Sésamo prize for short stories, but public recognition continued to elude him. Montero worked as a screenwriter for both television and the cinema, and adapted one of his own novels, Pájaro en una tormenta (Bird in a Storm), for serialisation. He was also the president of the Spanish Writers' Association until 1994. Montero also taught literature classes at the universities of California and Santa Cruz and at Dakar University in Senegal. He died of a heart attack on September 10, 2008, aged 71.