• Literature The Catalan writer Júlia Bacardit refuses to have her work translated into Spanish
  • Memories Bibliophilia, commitment and Europe: the three essences of Roberto Calasso

The Plenary of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) has elected in its session this Thursday, March 23, the writer and philologist Clara Sánchez (Guadalajara, March 1, 1955) to occupy chair X, vacant since the death of Francisco Brines on May 20, 2021. His candidacy was presented by the academics Soledad Puértolas, Carme Riera and Paloma Díaz-Mas.

Clara Sánchez graduated in Hispanic Philology from the Complutense University with a thesis, directed by the professor of Latin American Literature of the Autonoma, Teodosio Fernández, which dealt with the Mexican Narrative of the Wave: Gustavo Sainz, a study aimed at unraveling how the so-called Mexican "juvenilism" was scourging the narrative art and endowing it with an unknown freshness and irreverence. In the Complutense he entered the field of semantics under the baton of the academic Gregorio Salvador Caja. She was a university professor for seventeen years at the UNED, but she has also participated as a tertuliana, columnist and collaborator of various Spanish and foreign media.

Since his first novel published in 1989, Precious Stones, critics highlighted, as fundamental contributions to the literature of the late twentieth century, the originality and modernity of his narrative, his contemporaneity. On the international stage, Nouvel Observateur stressed that "she owns a style and a freedom of tone that enchants. His look is ironic. Cruelty is softened by melancholy and even indulgence to express our society."

After thirty-four years and hundreds of written pages, he has not ceased in his efforts to investigate the ins and outs of the present, to catch what the times bring. She herself has confessed her obsession with tearing the extraordinary from the ordinary, the surprising from the most routine lives.

His vital feeling, dragged from childhood, of strangeness and discomfort with life has been reflected in all his novels in characters who are forced to adapt to new and untimely situations: the strange look on the urbanization where the boy from Last News of Paradise lives; Julia's strangeness about her own existence in the dream she lives in Forebodings; Sandra's strangeness to discover that the scariest monsters are the ones that hide behind pleasant faces in What hides your name, and the strangeness of the narrator of A Million Lights on her first day of work. It could be said that on these and the rest of his novels the Kafkaesque winds have left a veil of uprooting difficult to avoid.

She is the author of the novels Piedras preciosas (1989, Debate, Alfaguara), No es diferente la noche (1990, Debate), El palacio varado (1993, Debate, Alfaguara), Desde el mirador (1996, Alfaguara), El misterio de todos los días (1999, Alfaguara), Últimas noticias del paraíso (2000, Premio Alfaguara), Un millón de luces (2004, Alfaguara), Presentimientos (2008, Alfaguara, Destino), Lo que esescondde tu nombre (2010, Nadal Prize, Destino), Entra en mi vida (2012, Destino), El cielo ha vuelta (2013, Premio Planeta), Cuando llega la luz (2016, Destino), El amante silenciosa (2019, Planeta), Infierno en el paraíso (2021, Planeta) and I peccati di Marisa Salas (2022, Garzanti, Italy; soon to be in Spain).

His work has been translated into several languages and has important international repercussion, especially in Italy. Among the awards received is the Alfaguara prize(Last news of paradise), the Nadal (What hides your name) or the Planet (The sky is back), among other national and international recognitions.

Sánchez has also prefaced books, among others by Mercè Rodoreda (broken mirror), Yukio Mishima (The sailor who emerged from the grace of the sea), Stevenson (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), a collection of poems by Alfonsina Storni (El País) or In cold blood by Truman Capote (El País).

According to The Trust Project criteria

Learn more

  • Complutense University
  • Italy
  • Planeta Award
  • Rafa Nadal
  • RAE
  • Guadalajara
  • literature