Elena Quiroga

Rubén, un médico que ha tratado a dos pacientes que acaban falleciendo, investiga y relata la vida y muerte de ambas mujeres suicidas, Daría y Blanca.

The rediscovery of a classic coming-of-age novel about the spiritual awakening of a teenage girl in the 1930s.

 "Let no young person read this book who has never asked any deeper questions, who is sure of life as if life were a place, and sleeps but does not dream, and wanders but does not move ahead, and feels no curiosity."

 With this warning, Elena Quiroga drew attention to the peculiarities of I Write Your Name, a novel that covers the years a teenage girl spends, from ten to sixteen, in an oppressive convent boarding school. The story is set in the years when Spain faced enormous divisions that would culminate in the Civil War. For Tadea, the protagonist, they also constitute a key stage of inner growth, of existential doubts, of philosophical searching, of questions about truth and freedom that the narrow-minded nuns are unable to answer. 

 Out of print for over thirty years, I Write Your Name is a moving coming-of-age novel with a spiritual undercurrent evocative of Simone Weill, an outsider like Elena Quiroga herself, overshadowed by other great figures such as Carmen Laforet and Ana María Matute within the limited space of literary prestige traditionally afforded to female authors, and whose legacy is now being forcefully reclaimed.

Spanish National Critics Prize 1960

Tadea, motherless and accustomed to a quiet, happy, and unrestricted childhood, moves to her aunt and uncle's house. Soon her universe full of curiosity and innocence will be reduced to a hostile world, full of warnings, prohibitions, and silences (aunt Concha, a fanatic and authoritarian Catholic, always watching, prohibiting and punishing). Loneliness and the weight of orphanhood – of which she cannot speak – push her to look for an escape: walks in the garden, glances towards the well that returns her words, the relief of being alone… But these escapades almost always come up against punishments. Tadea drowns in an environment in which everything remains closed, full of sadness.

The novel meticulously recreates this microcosm – the ways of life, the mentality, the day-to-day work –, almost always in scenes, with the richness of polyphony.

Through vivid dialogues and insightful introspection, Quiroga offers a lyrical and honest portrayal of human complexities, diverging from traditional social realism to delve into intimate emotional landscapes.

“Elena Quiroga was one of the pillars of the last half century, one of the great female representatives of the novel.” Manuel Seco

Cuando escribió esta obra, una de las pocas novelas largas de tema taurino escritas por una mujer, Elena Quiroga era joven, pero ya había conseguido el prestigioso "Premio Nadal" con Viento del Norte. La obra refleja la psicología de los hombres que viven el mundo de los toros.

A classic about feminine empowerment in a world of men.

Elena Quiroga is usually included among the leading names of the women who emerged on the novel-writing scene in the second half of the twentieth century, and her work often appears associated with that of Carmen Laforet and Ana María Matute. And, of course, her novels are among the first in Spanish in the 1950s to accommodate the renovating techniques of the great European and American masters alongside the influence of the rich Spanish narrative tradition. And all from a strong feminist position that situates women as the protagonists of her novels, fighting for the recognition of their rights in a society where feminine initiatives and education encountered so many limitations.

In The Sick Woman, two women experience a catharsis in different ways: one tries to find meaning in her life by distancing herself from her closest surroundings; the other refuses deliberately and definitively to look for that meaning. This is a work that undoubtedly deserves a re-reading from the standpoint of a more modern sensibility.

“Elena Quiroga was one of the pillars of the last half century, one of the great female representatives of the novel.”  Manuel Seco

Una sangre violenta, un amor misericordioso. Tras la muerte violenta de un intelectual en un accidente, su mujer abandonada  y diferentes personas de su vida –incluida la nueva familia formada junto a una segunda esposa–, se van encontrando antes del entierro.

La novela narra situaciones de los personajes en diferentes contextos, en el cementerio, en casa, en la verbena, en el centro de estudios, etc.

Un autobús recorre las calles de Madrid. Blas, el cobrador, y algunos viajeros, van narrando las peripecias de algunos de los pasajeros, sus conversaciones y aspecto, así como lo que se ve por la ventanilla y lo que esto sugiere.

A hundred-year-old chestnut tree tells the story of four generations. The tree itself is the narrator, sharing what it sees and hears. It is the true protagonist of the book and the one that exerts the strongest influence. The characters, who live under the shelter of its shade, are introduced to us in this original way.

1950 Nadal Prize

The novel that launched one of the most singular voices of postwar Spanish fiction.

In a remote Galician manor house, a pazo, a servant gives birth in the stables and disappears at dawn, leaving her newborn daughter behind. The child, Marcela, is taken in by the landowner, Álvaro de Castro — a cultivated, introspective man deeply rooted in his land and lineage. Years later, she will become his wife and the lady of the house she grew in. 

Set in rural Galicia, North Wind draws on the legacy of nineteenth-century realism — recalling Galdós and Pardo Bazán — while already anticipating Quiroga’s shift toward psychological modernism.

Beneath the rural setting lies a subtle exploration of class hierarchy, gender inequality, and inner conflict. The novel resists strict naturalism: its tension does not stem solely from social determinism, but from the characters’ private anguish and emotional contradictions.

With this debut, Elena Quiroga became the second woman ever to win the Nadal Prize and began the literary trajectory that would lead her to the Royal Spanish Academy.

“Her literature, avant-garde, ground-breaking, imbued with the imagination of William Faulkner, the twin sister of Virginia Woolf’s creativity […].” Vanity Fair

La autora basa esta narración en la doble vida del protagonista. Existe la apariencia, la imagen cara al exterior, y por otra parte, la realidad de sí mismo que él conoce muy bien y que jamás se ha atrevido a confesar. Este conflicto interno nace de una experiencia infantil, y el lector, que adquiere sospechas a través de los recuerdos del protagonista, llega al fondo de la motivación casi al final de la obra. La careta constituyó un hito muy notable en la novelística española de su época y conserva intactos el interés que despiertan los personajes, así como el aura poética que los envuelve.

Plácida the Young Woman gives its name to this collection of three magnificent stories and is a small masterpiece that describes the traits of a humble and resigned Galician peasant woman who is about to become a mother while her husband is in a distant country. It is dedicated “To a woman—and through her, to all the hard-working women of the Galician countryside—who died near the author in October 1955, without them ever having exchanged a word... She was very young. Her name was Plácida.”

Discurso de ingreso de Elena Quiroga en la Real Academia Española de la Lengua.

Darío Villanueva es el encargado de dar forma a la edición de las novelas completas de Elena Quiroga, dentro de la Biblioteca Castro, con la intención de recuperar la figura de esta gran escritora gallega de origen cántabro: una de las principales voces femeninas dentro de la narrativa española de los años 50. 

Tomo I:

• Viento del Norte
• La sangre

Tomo II:

• Algo pasa en la calle
• La careta
• La última corrida
• Tristura

Tomo III:

• Escrito tu nombre
• Presente profundo