Home - Portico of Galician Literature

Xavier Alcalá

Xavier Alcalá is one of Galicia’s most established writers. He has published over twenty works of fiction in the last thirty years. Themes in his work include emigration and the Spanish Civil War. Most recently he has published the trilogy Evangelical Memory, an extremely well documented account of the experiences of the Evangelical communities in Galicia during the twentieth century. Other well known novels include Our Ashes and Fable. He has written widely about his travels in Latin America and been a regular contributor to Galician newspapers since the 1970s. He is a trained telecommunications engineer… read more

Marilar Aleixandre

Marilar Aleixandre is professor of experimental sciences at the University of Santiago de Compostela. She is the author of several collections of poetry and adult and young adult fiction. She has written four novels and a collection of short stories, Wolves on the Islands. Her novel Theory of Chaos received the Xerais Prize for best novel in 2001. Two poetry collections were awarded top prizes, including Mutations, a recreation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses written in the voices of women. She has written several novels for young people, including Head of Medusa, and is the Galician translator of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone… read more

An Alfaya

An Alfaya has studied teacher training and criminology and helped found the Avento Theatre in Vigo as well as providing the voice for Betty Rubble in the Galician version of The Flintstones. She has written important works of fiction and young people’s literature, for which she has won numerous prizes. In the field of adult fiction, she has won the Magariños Award for I Killed a Man (2005), the popular San Clemente Award for Areaquente (2009), and the La Voz de Galicia Award for a novel in instalments for Secondary Road (2011). In the field of young people’s literature, her accolades include the Merlin Award… read more

Fran Alonso

Fran Alonso is an experienced writer, journalist and editor, and the director of the Galician publishing house Edicións Xerais. He has written numerous works of fiction for adults and young people, including Trailer (1991), about the lives and myths of transport workers, Cemetery of Elephants (1994), about the happenings of the night, Silence (1995), which looks at the schizophrenia of the urban world, Headaches (2001), about social anxiety, and Nobody (2011), about the occupants of an apartment block and the influence of virtual reality in our lives. His work on poetry has been similarly groundbreaking and includes a popular anthology… read more

Diego Ameixeiras

As well as being a journalist and screenwriter for Galician television, Diego Ameixeiras is one of Galicia’s most accomplished crime writers. His eight novels sometimes feature a detective, other times people living on the margins of life. He is not afraid to deal with contemporary issues such as political ambition and the preferential shares banking scandal. A lot of the action in his novels is centred around the city of Ourense, called Oregón. His most famous novels are Tell Me Something Dirty (2009) and Killing You Slowly (2013). Other novels include Three Seconds of Memory, which won the Xerais Prize for best novel in 2006… read more

Rosa Aneiros

A journalist and screenwriter, Rosa Aneiros is best known as a writer of adult and young adult fiction. She won prizes for her novels Resistance (2002), about two lovers involved in the resistance to the twentieth-century dictatorship in Portugal, The Sea Came to See Me (2004), about a biologist confronting the Prestige oil spill, and Winter Sun (2009), about a woman who escapes the Spanish Civil War and has to face the voices and wounds of exile. As a children’s writer, she caught attention with her novel Butterfly Wings (2009), with its cast of international characters, and most recently with the trilogy I Love You Leo A. (2013-4)… read more

Anxo Angueira

Anxo Angueira lectures in Galician literature at the University of Vigo. He has written four books of fiction, the most famous of which is Listing Ship, winner of the Xerais Prize for novels, about the tensions in a Galician village in the build-up to the Spanish Civil War. He is also the author of several poetry collections and essays on the history of Galician literature, in particular the Galician Revival of the second half of the nineteenth century. He is president of the Rosalía de Castro Foundation in Padrón and has produced Galician editions of both this poet’s major Galician works, Galician Songs and New Leaves… read more

Xurxo Borrazás

Xurxo Borrazás is considered a leading exponent of postmodern fiction in Galician, with ten novels and books of short stories to his name. He is known for his transgressive, experimental style. His best-known books are Vicious (Criminal in Galician), awarded the Spanish Critics’ Prize in 1994; I Is, about a writer who is transported back to the time of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake; In the Suitcase, about a couple who come across a suitcase full of banknotes; and Impure Thoughts. His essay Art and Part: From the Patriarchs to Suicidal Art was awarded the Galician Critics’ Prize in 2008. He has translated notable… read more

Begoña Caamaño

Begoña Caamaño was a highly acclaimed writer in the Galician language, author of two novels, Circe or the Pleasure of Blue (2009) and Morgana in Esmelle (2012), both recreations of myths, the first to do with the famous enchantress of Greek mythology, the second with Morgan le Fay of the Arthurian legend, King Arthur’s supernatural elder sister. This latter novel won numerous prizes when it came out, including those of the Galician Publishers’ and the Galician-Language Writers’ Associations. Begoña Caamaño was an experienced journalist who worked for Galician Radio, directing and presenting cultural programmes… read more

Marcos Calveiro

Marcos Calveiro has published numerous works of fiction, as well as a poetry collection and a study of the Galician poet Lois Pereiro. His books for young people include The Painter with the Hat of Mallows (2010) about the friendship between a troubled teenager and the painter Vincent van Gogh and Words of Water (2012) about a tribe on the move in Africa and a young boy’s race to grow up. The former has appeared in English; the latter was included in the 2014 IBBY List. His adult novels include Festina Lente (2008), about the time of the Inquisition in Galicia; Fontán (2015) about the nineteenth-century figure Domingo Fontán… read more

Marica Campo

Marica Campo was born and raised in O Incio. She later moved to the provincial capital, Lugo, where she attended a religious school with the intention of becoming a missionary. Having studied theology at the Pontifical University of Salamanca, she trained as a schoolteacher and taught for almost forty years in schools in Lugo province and the Canary Islands. She has written poetry, fiction, theatre and children’s literature and translated French authors into Galician. Her poetry has been awarded prizes by the Galician-Language Writers Association, which paid tribute to her work by erecting a monolith in her home town… read more

Xosé Carlos Caneiro

Xosé Carlos Caneiro is an accomplished narrator, poet and journalist. He is one of few writers to have won all three major Galician fiction prizes: the Blanco Amor, the Xerais and the García Barros. He is best known for his series of five novels The Misfortune of Solitude (1992, the Xerais), A Game of Apocrypha (1997, the Torrente Ballester and finalist for the Spanish National Book Award), Melancholia Perhaps (1999, the García Barros), The Centuries of the Moon (1999) and Ébora (2000, the Blanco Amor and the Eixo Atlántico). His novel Borges’s Rose (2000) won him the Vicente Risco Prize for fantasy literature. He has received… read more

Fina Casalderrey

Fina Casalderrey is one of Galicia’s most successful writers of children’s and young adult fiction and taught for many years at secondary level. She has published more than forty books and twice been nominated for the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award (in 2010 and 2012). In 1996 she was awarded the Spanish National Prize for Literature for The Mystery of Lúa’s Children. Her works have been included in the White Ravens Catalogue (Marriage Forbidden, Papa! and Who Wants to Adopt Me?). She has also written on Galician gastronomy. Her works have been translated widely inside Spain, and into English, French, Italian, Korean… read more

Francisco Castro

Francisco Castro has covered numerous topics in his books for adults and young people – a collection of erotic stories, Geographies, a book narrated by a drug dealer, Lost Generation, a historical novel set in the sixteenth century, The Words of Mist, which won the García Barros Prize. He has won the Blanco Amor Prize for a long novel with Spam, the Voz de Galicia Prize for a novel by instalments with The Heart of Snow White, and the Sarmiento Prize awarded by Galician schoolchildren several times. His most popular children’s book, Call Me Sinbad, was included in the IBBY Honour List. His most recent novel… read more

Cid Cabido

Cid Cabido is known for his writing that combines a strict realism with a strong sense of the absurd. His most famous novels are Bakery (1994) and Abelian Group (1999), both of which won the prestigious Blanco Amor Prize for novels. Abelian Group has been translated into Spanish and published by Alianza Editorial. More recently he has published the novels Bloomsday (2006) and A Story I Am Not Going to Tell (2009). His book of short stories Numbered Days (1991) won the City of Lugo Prize. He is also the author of a play, Copenhagen (1993), in collaboration with Andrés A. Vila, which won the Álvaro Cunqueiro Prize… read more

Fernando M. Cimadevila

Fernando M. Cimadevila is the author of a series of novels dedicated to The Secret World of Basilius Hoffman, in which the explorer of hidden worlds and part-time knight Basilius Hoffman goes off in search of the legendary Cartographer’s Diary in the company of his nephew. Three novels in this series have been published to date: The Dream Snatcher (2011), A Lighthouse in the Dark (2013) and The Battle for Avalon (2015). He has written a series of children’s novels, The Adventures of the Palpator, and a detective novel set in Nepal, Stroking the Sky (2014). Fernando Cimadevila has run his own bookshop, Auryn, dedicated to… read more

Alfredo Conde

Alfredo Conde studied navigation and history and has worked as a merchant seaman and as a history teacher. He was an independent MP and Minister of Culture in the regional Galician government during the late 1980s, and also the first president of the Galician PEN Club. He is best known for his fiction, written in both the Galician and Spanish languages. His novel The Griffon won the Spanish National Book Award, the Blanco Amor Prize for novels and the prestigious Grinzane Cavour Prize for best foreign fiction. His novel The Other Days received one of Spain’s oldest literary awards, the Premio Nadal… read more

Ledicia Costas

Ledicia Costas is the author of two children’s books, Scarlet Fever the Late Departed Cook (2015) and its prequel Emeraldine the Late Departed Kid (2016), in which the narrative is interspersed with cooking recipes. For the first of these, she was awarded the Spanish National Prize for Literature in 2015. She has also written several young adult novels: A Star in the Wind (2000); Heart of Jupiter (2012), available in English, about the dangers of online relationships; Grey Enclosure (2014) about an army of wolf soldiers who invade City Vii to carry off those with disabilities; Jules Verne and the Secret Life of Plant Women (2016)… read more

Berta Dávila

Berta Dávila is the author of three poetry collections: Empty Body (2007), Inside (2008) and Root of the Fissure (2013), which won the Spanish Critics’ Prize for best poetry collection. She has also written three books of fiction: the novel I Will Dance on Your Tomb (2008), the book of short stories The Art of Failure (2010), translated into Spanish and Japanese, and the novel Emma Olsen’s Last Book (2013), her best-known work, translated into Spanish and awarded the Repsol Short Fiction Prize and the Galician Publishers’ Association prize for best work of fiction. As a result of this book, she was made the Galician Publishers’ Association… read more

Xabier P. DoCampo

Xabier P. DoCampo is one of Galicia’s most distinguished writers. As a schoolteacher, he has been heavily involved in movements of educational reform in Galicia. He has also contributed greatly, in libraries and other settings, to the promotion of reading. He has worked as an actor and scriptwriter. But he is best known for his works of fiction aimed at younger readers, of which there are more than thirty. These have been included in the IBBY Honour List and the White Ravens Catalogue. In 1995 he won the Spanish National Prize for Literature with When There’s a Knock on the Door at Night. His novel… read more

Pedro Feijoo

Pedro Feijoo is one of Galicia’s most exciting contemporary authors. Trained as a musician, he has taken part in numerous musical projects and written a survey of the state of Galician music. His story ‘The Viaduct’s Secret’ was published in 2011. But his greatest success came a year later with the publication of the novel Children of the Sea, awarded the Martín Sarmiento and San Clemente Prizes for fiction and shortlisted for the Xerais Prize for best novel. This work was followed by Memory of the Rain in 2013. His novels are set in Galician cities such as Vigo and Santiago de Compostela, contain a heavy dose… read more

Miguel Anxo Fernández

Miguel Anxo Fernández teaches Audiovisual Communication at the University of Vigo. He is a film and TV critic for the Galician newspaper La Voz de Galicia and has written or contributed to important studies on Galician and Spanish cinema. In 2012, he received the prestigious Galician Culture Award for audiovisual creation. He is best known for his crime fiction, starring private detective Frank Soutelo, based in Los Angeles, but with Galician roots. The first of the novels in this series is A Niche for Marilyn (2002), which won the García Barros Prize for long novels. His other fiction includes Blues for Moraima (2017)… read more

Agustín Fernández Paz

Agustín Fernández Paz is a best-selling Galician author of children’s and young adult fiction. He has published more than forty books and his work has been translated into French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish among others. He has twice been nominated for the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award and in 2012 was Spain’s nominee for the Hans Christian Andersen Award (the children’s Nobel). His books are regularly included in the IBBY Honour List and the White Ravens Catalogue. In 2008 he won the Spanish National Prize for Literature for his book of short stories Nothing Really Matters in Life More Than Love… read more

Xesús Fraga

Xesús Fraga was born in London, but later moved to Coruña and Betanzos. He is one of only four Galician-language writers to have won the Spanish National Book Award for Fiction, which he received for his novel Virtues (and Mysteries) (2020). A graduate in journalism from Salamanca University, he has worked for the newspaper La Voz de Galicia in the sections “Galicia” and “Culture”. He writes both adult and young adult fiction. Virtues (and Mysteries) also received the Blanco Amor and the Galician Critics’ Awards. Other titles include Tute for Four (2000), A-Z (2003) and Solimán (2004). His two YA titles… read more

Elena Gallego Abad

An experienced journalist, Elena Gallego Abad is the author of a series of novels about Dragal, the Galician dragon seeking to reincarnate in the body of a boy, Hadrián. The saga comprises three novels – Dragal I: The Dragon’s Inheritance (2010); Dragal II: The Dragon’s Metamorphosis (2011); Dragal III: The Dragon’s Fraternity (2012) – and further novels are planned. A film, together with other multimedia content, is currently in production. Elena Gallego Abad is the author of another novel, Seven Skulls (2014), which follows a journalist, Marta Vilas, as she investigates a case of multiple murder. The author… read more

Camilo Gonsar

Camilo Gonsar is one of the outstanding Galician writers of the second half of the twentieth century, a member of the New Galician Narrative movement of this time. He is the author of four novels, the most famous of which is Towards Times Square (1980) about a character who walks around New York City at night. He was also an exceptional storyteller, and his short stories – published as Far from Us and Inside (1961), Cement and Other Scenes (1994) and Around the No (1995) – were later brought together in a volume entitled Collected Stories 1961-1995. The author lived in London and New York… read more

Xabier López López

Xabier López López is the author of numerous novels, including: The Notebook (2001), awarded the Risco Prize for fantasy literature; Monkey in the Mirror (2002), awarded the Lueiro Prize for a short novel; The Life That Kills Us (2003), awarded both the García Barros and the Spanish Critics’ Prizes; and Chains (2013), winner of the Xerais Prize for best novel, in which the author comes across a woman reading his novel on the beach and different fragments/styles are combined to delve deep into what constitutes a novel. He is also the author of several children’s books. His works have been translated into Spanish, Portuguese… read more

Inma López Silva

Inma López Silva teaches dramatic theory at the Galician School of Dramatic Art and holds a doctorate in Galician philology. Her work varies between novels such as Concubines (2002), awarded the Xerais Prize for best novel, and Memory of Cities without Light (2008), awarded the Blanco Amor and San Clemente Prizes, and books of a more intimate nature such as diaries about her experiences living in New York (New York, New York, 2007) and becoming a mother for the first time (Maternosofia, 2014). She has published two collections of short stories, Roses, Crows and Songs (2000) and Ink (2012)… read more

Antón Lopo

Antón Lopo is a key figure on the contemporary Galician cultural scene. He has published eight poetry collections; Talk to Me won the prestigious Esquío Award. He is also the author of six books of fiction, including the novels Obedience (García Barros Award, 2010) and Extraordinary (Spanish Critics’ Award, 2018). His play Men Only Count to Three earned him the Álvaro Cunqueiro Award. He coordinated the cultural supplement Revista das Letras, his work as a journalist earning him the Johán Carballeira Award. He has written essays on important figures of Galician literature, such as the poets Fermín Bouza-Brey, Uxío Novoneyra and Lois Pereiro… read more

Santiago Lopo

Santiago Lopo is a highly successful writer in the Galician language. Having studied Translation and Interpreting at Vigo University and taught French at the Escuela Oficial de Idiomas in Pontevedra, he has published six novels and a book of short stories (The Nereids’ Voice, 2016). Of his novels, Game Over (2007) won the La Voz de Galicia Award for a novel in instalments, Zulu Time (2012) the García Barros, The Madmen’s Diagonal (2014) the Repsol, The Art of Making Verses (2017) the Xerais, and The Postwoman (2021) the Losada Diéguez. As well as translating screenplays from English, he has translated two works by the French writer… read more

Manuel Lourenzo González

Manuel Lourenzo González is one of few writers to have been awarded the three major Galician prizes for novels – the Blanco Amor, the Xerais and the García Barros – with the three adult novels he has published: Archaeophagy (1995), The Garden of Floating Stones (2008) and Atl (2012). He is the author of six collections of short stories, including a selection set in Pontevedra, Storks at the Bottom of the Estuary (2015), and numerous titles aimed at younger readers, including Brother of the Wind, awarded the Merlín Prize in 2003. He has written two plays, Carnival Play and Music of the Night, awarded… read more

Andrea Maceiras

Andrea Maceiras has studied Galician and Spanish philology, and holds a PhD from Coruña University. She has published several children’s and young adult novels: Project Butterfly (2007) about a mathematician who sets out to verify the butterfly effect; Tamurana Violet (2010) about an island whose inhabitants are coloured violet; The Secret of the Ocellated Lizard (2012) about a boy who returns to the village; Clouds of Evolution (2013) about three people who meet in a bus station; You’ll Come Back, Dolphin (2014) about a girl who visits the Death Coast in Galicia with her family; My Dear Scheherazade (2014)… read more

Marina Mayoral

Marina Mayoral, retired Professor of Spanish Literature at the Complutense University of Madrid, is a bilingual Galician and Spanish writer. Her best-known works in Galician are One Tree, One Goodbye (1988), He Was Called Luís (1989), Sad Weapons (1994, 32 editions in the Galician language, 24 in Spanish) and Dear Friend (1995); in Spanish, Hidden Harmony (1994). Her works in Spanish are published by Alfaguara, Cátedra and others. She has published studies on such important writers as Rosalía de Castro, Emilia Pardo Bazán and Ramón del Valle-Inclán. Her works have been translated into multiple languages… read more

Xosé Luís Méndez Ferrín

Xosé Luís Méndez Ferrín is one of the outstanding writers of his generation. A highly proficient narrator and poet, he has numerous publications in the fields of fiction, poetry and essay. His collection With Gunpowder and Magnolias (1976) is considered one of the most emblematic poetry collections of the last fifty years and is one of five books contained in the bilingual Galician-Spanish edition Fundamental Poetry: 1976-2005 (Calambur, 2011). His best-known works of fiction include the novel Brittany, Emeraldine (1987), which draws on the work of authors like Jack London, Gonzalo Torrente Ballester and Álvaro Cunqueiro… read more

Xosé Monteagudo

Xosé Monteagudo works for the Inland Revenue and writes novels in which intrigue is mixed with underhand dealings, and voices arrive from the past to reconstruct a story. He is the author of five novels to date: The Voices of the News (2002), This Story (2006), A Smart Guy (2009), The Curious World of Normal People (2012) and Everything We Were (2016). The Voices of the News and A Smart Guy were awarded two of the three main Galician fiction prizes: the Blanco Amor and the García Barros. Everything We Were is considered a milestone in modern Galician literature and has impressed readers and critics alike… read more

Teresa Moure

Teresa Moure is one of Galicia’s most accomplished writers. She is the author of five novels, the most famous of which is Black Nightshade, which received numerous accolades when it was first published, including the Xerais Prize for best novel and the Spanish Critics’ Prize for Galician fiction. She writes essays and theatre. Two essays, Another Language Is Possible and We Re-Queer a New World, received the Ramón Piñeiro Prize for best essay, while A Spring for Aldara won the Rafael Dieste Prize for best play. She has a doctorate in general linguistics and teaches in the faculties of philosophy and philology… read more

Miguel-Anxo Murado

Miguel-Anxo Murado is a well-known Galician writer and journalist who spent periods of time in the ex-Yugoslavia and the Middle East. Much of his fiction is based on these experiences. Noise: War Stories details his experiences in Bosnia and Croatia, End of the Century in Palestine reflects on his work as a press officer for the United Nations during the Second Intifada, The Fever Dream grew out of an attack of fever in Cairo. One of his most lyrical story-books is Ash Wednesday. All his fiction draws universal lessons from seemingly insignificant or transient details. He has also published poetry, drama and essays… read more

Xosé Neira Vilas

Xosé Neira Vilas (1928-2015) had a rural upbringing. At the age of 21, he moved to Argentina, where he entered into contact with important Galician cultural figures and founded the publishing house Follas Novas. He married the writer Anisia Miranda and together they moved to Cuba, where they remained for thirty years before returning to Galicia in 1992. His book Memoirs of a Peasant Boy is one of the most successful novels in the history of Galician literature and forms part of a trio of novels (Memoirs of a Peasant Boy, Letters to Lelo, Those Years of Moncho) that reflect the rural world and emigration… read more

Emma Pedreira

Emma Pedreira is a highly successful Galician writer who has published numerous works of poetry and fiction. Her poetry books have received many awards, including the Jovellanos International Poetry Prize for ‘the best poem in the world’ in 2017 for her poem ‘The Widow’s Shopping List’. Her best-known works of fiction are Bibliopaths and Phobologists (2017), a series of stories about books containing books that make you ill or well; Blood Beast (2018), winner of the Xerais Prize for novels, based on the figure of Manuel Blanco Romasanta, Spain’s first recorded serial killer, who claimed… read more

Xavier Queipo

Xavier Queipo holds degrees in biology and medicine and surgery. Since 1989, he has lived and worked in Brussels, Belgium. He has published numerous works of fiction, among them Arctic and Other Seas (1990), The Northwest Passage (1996), Kite (2001), Dragoness (2007) and Extramunde (2011), and has been awarded many prizes, including the García Barros and Xerais Prizes for best novel. Several of his works have been translated into French, Portuguese and Spanish. Aside from writing poetry, essays and children’s literature, he is also a renowned translator into Galician from English and French… read more

María Xosé Queizán

María Xosé Queizán has been a leading figure in the feminist movement of the Iberian peninsula for the last forty years, ever since she published her groundbreaking essay The Woman in Galicia (1977). Apart from her essays, which include studies on Mary Shelley and Emilia Pardo Bazán, she has written numerous works of fiction, including The Likeness (available in English), Love of Tango and Attention, Guard!, which look at marginalized groups in society and their struggle for equal rights. She has published poetry, plays, including Antigone, The Force of Blood (a finalist for the Álvaro Cunqueiro Prize)… read more

Anxo Rei Ballesteros

Anxo Rei Ballesteros was a highly accomplished writer who combined the use of different narrative techniques with a critical, philosophical approach to the world we live in. He wrote four novels, the last published posthumously: Of Angels and the Dead, Sun-Ray, Will I See You Again? and Night of the Little Owl. He also published a book of short stories, The Shadow of Your Dreams. His essay Time and Revenge, a study of time through the prism of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, won the Ramón Piñeiro Prize for best essay. He also wrote a play, Draught Games, and produced versions of Samuel Beckett’s Molloy… read more

María Reimóndez

María Reimóndez is the author of seven novels, including The Knitting Club (2006), Pirate (2009) and three novels in which the secondary characters of one novel become the protagonists of another: On the Road to Extinction (2012), From the Conflict (2014) and The Music of Living Beings (2015). She is the founder of an NGO, Implicadas/os no Desenvolvemento (Involved in Development), devoted to eradicating gender discrimination in countries such as India and Ethiopia. She has written a guidebook to feminisms of the world, Feminisms (2013), in collaboration with Olga Castro. She has numerous works… read more

Manuel Rivas

Manuel Rivas is Galicia’s most international writer. He has published eight books in English: four novels, two poetry collections and two books of short stories (one a film tie-in, Butterfly’s Tongue). His novel The Carpenter’s Pencil, which has also been made into a film, is the most widely translated work of Galician literature and has been translated into thirty languages. His most recent novel, also a film, is All Is Silence, which was published by Harvill Secker in May 2013. With his book of short stories Vermeer’s Milkmaid & Other Stories, he won the Spanish National Prize for Literature in 1996. He works as a journalist… read more

Antón Riveiro Coello

Antón Riveiro Coello is one of the most promising writers of his generation. He has published eight novels, the most famous of which are Bakunin’s Turtledoves (winner of the García Barros Prize for best novel in 2000) and Laura in the Desert (winner of the Spanish Critics’ Prize for Galician fiction in 2011). He also has several collections of short stories, including most recently Casas Baratas, stories set in the provincial town where the author grew up, and Water Ghosts, as well as essays, children’s literature and poetry. Having studied law at Santiago de Compostela University, Riveiro Coello was a civil servant… read more

Susana Sanches Arins

Susana Sanches Arins is a high-school teacher in Galicia. She is the author of three poetry collections, the first of which, [de]construction, won the Xosé María Pérez Parallé National Poetry Prize in 2008, an award which includes publication of the collection by Espiral Maior. She is best known, however, for her narrative book seique (and they say), which escapes genre classification and recuperates memory of the victims of the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) and its aftermath. Only through remembering the atrocities of the past, committed by fellow citizens of a country, the author argues, can mourning be undertaken and the healing process begin… read more

María Solar

María Solar works in the fields of both journalism and literature. For many years, she has been a presenter for Galician television and radio. Having studied both journalism and biology, she has published essays on ecology. Her numerous children’s books have been included in the prestigious White Ravens Catalogue. My Favourite Nightmare was voted best children’s book of the year on the literary blog Fervenzas Literarias and won the Lazarillo Prize awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Culture. In the field of adult literature, she has published Stolen Hours, which received the Sarmiento Prize… read more

Anxos Sumai

Anxos Sumai has been a regular online diarist, and this gave rise to her first two books, Guardian Angels (2003) and Melody of Used Days (2005), diaries that function as novels. Since then, she has published two more works of fiction, This Is How Whales Are Born (2007), which won the Repsol Short Fiction Prize and made her the Galician Publishers’ Association author of the year, and Harvest Moon (2013), awarded the García Barros Prize for best novel and the Spanish Critics’ Prize. Anxos Sumai has worked as a radio journalist, contributing weekly reflections to the programme Cultural Diary on Galician radio… read more

Abel Tomé

Abel Tomé is one of the younger generation of Galician writers, but his work has already garnered widespread attention. He graduated in journalism from the University of Santiago de Compostela and is studying for a Master’s in Human Rights. Having won a prize for food journalism with some of his colleagues in 2013 and the poetry prize Revista A Pipa in 2015, his first published novel, The Night of the Crow, was shortlisted for the Illa Nova Award for fiction in 2017. His second novel, The Night of the Wolf, won the same award in 2019. The two books form part of a series, the titles of the chapters… read more

Suso de Toro

Suso de Toro is the author of eight novels for adults, including Thirteen Chimes, which won him the Spanish National Prize for Literature in 2003. The critic Basilio Losada described the novel Tick-Tock as perhaps the most impressive novel ever written in the Galician language. He has published several collections of short stories, including the groundbreaking Polaroid, a reference point in modern Galician literature, as well as three novels for younger readers. He teaches Galician language and literature at secondary school and is a regular contributor to newspapers such as El País. He is considered… read more

Rexina Vega

Rexina Vega teaches Spanish at the University of Vigo, where she specializes in literary self-translation and the work of the Galician writer Álvaro Cunqueiro. She is the author of three novels in Galician: Shoal (2007), a look at the troubled years of Franco’s dictatorship through the prism of the industrial, Atlantic city of Vigo, which won the prestigious Xerais Prize for novels; Dark Butterfly (2012), a study of madness, how this leads to division and exclusion, and the impotence of psychiatry to combat it; and No One Sleeps (2017), an examination of the dark side of human relationships, sex and the body as a prison… read more

Lito Vila Baleato

Lito Vila Baleato was born in Germany and, having grown up in Santiago de Compostela and studied German and Hispanic Philology at the university there, he is now a secondary school teacher in Germany, where he has published numerous textbooks on learning Spanish as a foreign language. From his position as an “emigrant”, he contributes a blog, La generación de la burbuja (The Bubble Generation), to the Galician newspaper El Correo Gallego. Campus Morte, published in 2018, is his first novel in the Galician language and won the prestigious Sarmiento Award, an award that is voted on by three thousand schoolchildren… read more

Luísa Villalta

Luísa Villalta was a prolific Galician writer, teacher and violinist. She wrote works in the genres of poetry, theatre, fiction and essay. Her poetry collection In Particular (2004) won the Espiral Maior Award for Poetry. Her theatre plays were brought together in a single volume, Luísa Villalta: The Complete Dramatic Works, by Edicións Proscritas in 2018. She wrote about the relationship between music and poetry, the language of sounds and poetics as a state of consciousness. In 2022, she was chosen as the figure to be celebrated on Galician Women in Literature Day. She taught Galician language and literature… read more

Domingo Villar

Domingo Villar, whose work has been translated into multiple languages, is one of Galicia’s most international writers. He has published a series of crime novels featuring dyed-in-the-wool Galician detective Inspector Leo Caldas and his Aragonese sidekick, Rafael Estévez, who has difficulty understanding the Galician sense of irony. The first novel in this series is Water-Blue Eyes (2006), about the death of a saxophonist. This is followed by Death on a Galician Shore (2009), about the death of a sailor and a village’s unwillingness to open up to outsiders. This novel was voted book of the year… read more

Iolanda Zúñiga

Iolanda Zúñiga is a music teacher who has worked in a vegetarian restaurant in Vigo, as a bookshop and record shop assistant and as a puppeteer. Her first book, Post-it Lives, is a collection of forty-six microstories relating to universal daily situations that was published in 2007 to critical acclaim. She has since published a poetry collection, Amor amen, and three novels: Periphery (winner of the Xerais Prize for novels), about the precariousness of life and lack of opportunities in the favelas, Nights in the Safari: A Manual for Confused Lovers (published under the heteronym Marleen MaLone) and Natura… read more

Galician Books in English

Things

Nothing Really Matters in Life More Than Love

Dragal I: The Dragon’s Inheritance

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Texts

AN ANIMAL CALLED MIST
by Ledicia Costas

THE LAST MISSION OF THE USS INDIANAPOLIS Hunter Scott In childhood, something magical happens with books and films. Because children possess that special thing that is then lost with the passing of the years: the ability to be surprised. Surprise is a helium balloon in the shape of a star. The seller, who has been standing for four hours at the entrance to the fairground, knows this well. She has an enormous clutch of moored balloons in her right hand. She is quite sure, were she not so large and corpulent, any moment now she would go flying after them to some wonderful place, driven by the inertia of the wind and expectation. The woman blew them up and tied them one by one, with all the carefulness of her fifteen years of experience. Her mother was a balloon seller, and her grandmother before her. She has lots of forms: a whale, a bird, E.T., a dragon… It’s strange that, with this vast bouquet of showy colours she is holding in the air, she should be invisible to the grown-ups. They pass alongside, brush against her, even bump into her. They know she’s there, standing next to the stall where a Gypsy woman prepares candy floss while breastfeeding a child. They know this, but don’t see her, don’t take her into consideration. She is part of the furniture. With the children, it’s not the same. They see her. Each and every one of them. And as soon as they set eyes on that cluster of balloons, they start tugging…

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Portico of Galician Literature

Galician is the language of Galicia in north-west Spain, whose capital is Santiago de Compostela, and it shares a common heritage with Portuguese.

There are numerous authors writing in the Galician language and in 2011 a total of 1855 books were published in Galician (according to the Spanish ISBN Agency).

Here the visitor to the site will be able to read work by selected Galician authors, find synopses of their most successful titles and read a short biography.

The visitor will also find a list of Galician books already published in English, with links to publishers’ websites where available.

Finally there is information on the availability of rights and translation grants, together with a short history of Galician literature from 1196 to today.

Enjoy your visit!

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