Camilo José Cela (Iria Flavia, 1916-Madrid, 2002) is one of the essential figures of 20th century Spanish literature and one of our few Nobel Prize winners. His early years were filled with a feverish activity as a journalist, in which his polyphonic personality as a writer was forged.

From this wealth of journalistic collaborations, La forja de un escritor (1943-1952) features  fifty articles - mostly from Arriba and La Vanguardia Española - arranged across three thematic sections: the life experiences of the young artist, reflections on the writer and writing and considerations on painting and other arts (cinema, music, photography). Undoubtedly, this is a suggestive approach to the polyhedral writer that reveals to the reader a new Celia that mixes dramatic lyric with his life experience.

Adolfo Sotelo Vázquez is Professor of Spanish Literature at the University of Barcelona and Director of the Camilo José Cela Chair of Hispanic Studies at the Universidad Camilo José Cela in Madrid. For twenty years he has been working on the personality and the literary and cultural world of Cela, and has published several of the writer’s most important works.