Ángel María de Lera
(Baides, 1912-Madrid, 1984) Spanish writer.His work is situated within the current of postwar realism, with a strong social charge and an accentuated drama.The son of a rural doctor, Lera began his studies in Humanities at the Seminary of Vitoria.A crisis of faith truncated his religious vocation and motivated his trip to Andalusia, where he undertook law studies at the University of Granada, which were interrupted with the arrival of the civil war.
For his support of the republican cause he was imprisoned between 1939 and 1947.Upon leaving prison, he alternated different jobs until he devoted himself entirely to journalism.Apart from his numerous collaborations in newspapers and magazines, he revealed himself as a novelist, achieving great success with the public and critics-mainly as a result of winning the Álvarez Quintero Prize and the Royal Academy Award-with Los Olivos (1957), The bugles of fear (1958), The wedding (1959), Embarrassment (1960), Trap (1962), We have lost the sun (1963) and Earth to die (1964), work, the latter, which won the Pérez Galdós Prize.
Both We have lost the sun and Land to die describe the unstoppable exodus of Spanish emigrants to the rest of European countries after the civil confrontation, and expose one of the main problems inherent to this diaspora: that of the irremediable depopulation of the Spanish fields.Considered a politically committed author, he criticized the literary aestheticism of the writers locked in his ivory tower, and used his works both to define his ideal of social justice and to demand the most absolute freedom for writers.
His constant concern for social issues led the newspaper ABC to designate him as a special envoy to Germany, where he devoted himself to studying the precarious situation of Spanish emigrant workers.From his stay in Germany his collection of reports was born, grouped under the common title With the suitcase on the shoulder (1965).Once back in Spain, he published another book of reports, On the roads of rural medicine (1966), as well as his novels Fanáticos (1969) and Se sells a man (1973).
He elaborated on the subject of the civil war and the postwar period with a cycle entitled The years of wrath , started with The last flags (1968) , a work that would obtain the Planeta Prize in 1967, and to which Los que perdimos (1974), La noche sin riberas (1976), and, finally, Dark dawn (1977).
He was also the author of some Dialogues on violence (1974), of an Open letter to a fanatic (1975), of the biography Ángel Pestaña, portrait of an anarchist (1977), and the book dedicated to the analysis of nineteen asylums scattered throughout the Spanish geography, My journey around madness (1972).His last two works are The man who returned from paradise (1979) and the novel that revolves around the delicate theme of terrorism in transitional Spain: Kidnapping at the Iron Gate (1982).
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