Antonio Gamoneda, Cervantes Prize 2006, born in Oviedo in 1931, experienced the cruelest hardships of social and political oppression under the Franco dictatorship as a boy and young man. DESCRIPTION OF THE LIE / DESCRIPCIÓN DE LA MENTIRA, first published in 1977, bares the heart and soul of a Spain just beginning to recover from the horrors of those years. Gamoneda's work is valued world-wide for the incisive and innovative language with which human experience finds the necessary words for grappling with its meaning.
