Jorge Semprún
25. January 2008 06:28
Jorge Semprún, was born in Madrid in 1923, the son of a prominent Spanish diplomat and university professor. When Franco took power, his family fled to France. While still in his teens, Semprún joined the French resistance movement and was captured by the Gestapo. He was sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp, where he was an active member of the clandestine communist organization.
“For me, there is nothing about the camps that cannot be put into words. Language makes everything possible for us. But the writing is interminable; it is never done, because an isolated work by itself cannot do more than allude to fragments of reality…”
Expelled from the Communist party in 1964 because of his anti-Stalinist views, he became a full-time writer. His first novel, The Long Voyage, won the prestigious Formentor prize; his other highly acclaimed works include The Second Death of Ramón Mercader, What a Beautiful Sunday, Literature and Life, and, mostly recently, Twenty One Years and One Day, a fictional exploration of the lingering consequences of the Spanish Civil War. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages.
Both a novelist and a screenwriter, his film-scripts include Z and The Confession, both directed by Constantin Costas-Gavras, Le Guerre est Finie for Alain Renais, and Les Routes de Sud for Joseph Losey. Both Z and Le Guerre est Finie were nominated for an Oscar.
Jorge Semprún lives in Paris.
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