Julio Llamazares

Julio Llamazares (born Julio Alonso Llamazares in Vegamián, León, in 1955) is a Spanish novelist, poet, travel writer and screenwriter. Writing in Spanish, he is concerned with individual and collective memory in Spanish society and with the slow disappearance of rural cultural heritage. He belongs to the generation of writers who emerged after the Spanish transition to democracy, and he is one of the most recognisable voices in Spanish fiction about the countryside.

He was born in Vegamián, a village in León that was soon flooded by the Porma reservoir. His father was a state primary-school teacher, and after the village was destroyed the family moved to Olleros de Sabero, in the coal-mining basin of Sabero. Growing up between these two places shaped his life and much of his writing. He studied law but gave up legal practice to work in print, radio and television journalism. He lives in Madrid.

He began as a poet, with La lentitud de los bueyes (1979) and Memoria de la nieve (1982). His first novel, Luna de lobos (1985), follows four fugitives who spent nine years hiding in the Cantabrian mountains to escape Nationalist repression. La lluvia amarilla (1988), in English The Yellow Rain, tells the story of the last inhabitant of Ainielle, an abandoned village in the Spanish Pyrenees. Both novels were finalists for Spain's National Literature Prize in narrative. His travel books, such as El río del olvido (1990), and his newspaper columns share the same concern with landscape and with what time leaves behind.

His style mixes personal memory, close description of landscape and historical reflection. In Escenas de cine mudo (1994) he gave literary form to experiences from his childhood. His legacy rests largely on giving voice to abandoned villages and to the memory of the postwar years and the dictatorship. Luna de lobos was also made into a film in 1987, and he has worked as a screenwriter.