Spanish writer who fled civil war to a British village honoured in Madrid
Arturo Barea, loved for his books and BBC talks, has had a city square named after him in the Spanish capital near his former school
Sam Jones in Madrid
Saturday 4 March 2017 11.04 EST
In March 1939, a hungry and haunted Spanish refugee arrived in England with his wife, a typewriter and a head still roiling with the carnage and squalor they had left behind.
“My life,” Arturo Barea would later recall, “was broken in two. I had no perspectives, no country, no home, no job.”
Although exiled and “spiritually smashed” by Spain’s civil war, he would eventually recover three of those four losses and write perhaps the most definitive and personal account of his country’s history during the first four decades of the 20th century. On Saturday, partly at the prompting of British admirers, his achievements were finally given proper recognition in Spain, as the mayor of Madrid, Manuela Carmena, formally opened a square in his honour, the Plaza de Arturo Barea.
Barea’s autobiographical trilogy, The Forging of a Rebel, was admired by George Orwell, who drily noted: “Señor Barea is one of the most valuable of the literary acquisitions that England has made as a result of Fascist persecution.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/04/spanish-writer-who-fled-civil-war-to-a-british-village-honoured-in-madrid