Literature in Spanish is one of Europe's great traditions. Here we focus mainly on writing from Spain; for a list of essential works see the Spanish classics.
The Middle Ages
Castilian literature begins with epic: the Cantar de mio Cid, composed around 1200, tells the deeds of El Cid. In the thirteenth century Gonzalo de Berceo, the first Castilian poet known by name, wrote saints' lives and miracles of the Virgin, and King Alfonso X made Castilian a language of learned prose. The fourteenth century brought the Libro de buen amor by the Archpriest of Hita and the moral tales of Count Lucanor by Don Juan Manuel; the fifteenth Jorge Manrique's Coplas on the death of his father, among the most famous verses in the language.
In 1499 Fernando de Rojas published La Celestina, a tragicomedy in dialogue about the love of Calisto and Melibea, brokered by the old go-between Celestina: a raw, modern work halfway between drama and novel.
The Golden Age
Between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Spain lived its literary Golden Age. The Renaissance poetry of Garcilaso de la Vega introduced Italian metres; the mystical poetry of St Teresa of Ávila and St John of the Cross reached extraordinary heights. In 1554 Lazarillo de Tormes launched the picaresque novel.
In 1605 and 1615 Miguel de Cervantes published the two parts of Don Quixote, the story of a gentleman who, driven mad by reading chivalric romances, sets out with his squire Sancho Panza to right the world's wrongs. It is considered the first modern novel and one of the most translated books in the world. Cervantes died in 1616, a few days before Shakespeare.
The theatre was dominated by Lope de Vega, author of hundreds of plays such as Fuenteovejuna and The Knight of Olmedo, who founded the popular comedia nueva; by Tirso de Molina, who created Don Juan in The Trickster of Seville; and by Pedro Calderón de la Barca, author of Life Is a Dream. In poetry, the difficult, luminous Baroque of Luis de Góngora contrasted with the sharp satire of Francisco de Quevedo.
Eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
After an Enlightenment eighteenth century, with Cadalso's Cartas marruecas and Moratín's theatre, the nineteenth brought Romanticism, with José de Espronceda, José Zorrilla's Don Juan Tenorio and Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer's Rimas, then the great realist novel: Benito Pérez Galdós, author of the Episodios nacionales and Fortunata and Jacinta, Leopoldo Alas "Clarín" with La Regenta, and Emilia Pardo Bazán.
The twentieth century
After the defeat of 1898 the Generation of '98, with Miguel de Unamuno, Pío Baroja, Azorín, Antonio Machado and Ramón del Valle-Inclán, questioned the essence of Spain. The philosopher José Ortega y Gasset shaped an entire era. The Generation of '27 brought together poets such as Federico García Lorca, Rafael Alberti, Luis Cernuda, Vicente Aleixandre and Jorge Guillén, linked to the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, where Dalí and Buñuel also lived. The civil war scattered them: Lorca was killed, many chose exile. Juan Ramón Jiménez (1956) and Vicente Aleixandre (1977) won the Nobel Prize.
After the war came Camilo José Cela, Nobel laureate in 1989, with The Family of Pascual Duarte, Carmen Laforet with Nada, Miguel Delibes, Ana María Matute and Carmen Martín Gaite. With democracy Spanish fiction opened to the world: Eduardo Mendoza, Javier Marías, Antonio Muñoz Molina, Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Almudena Grandes, Carlos Ruiz Zafón with The Shadow of the Wind, Javier Cercas, Manuel Vilas, Fernando Aramburu with Homeland and, in Catalan, Mercè Rodoreda and Jaume Cabré. The most prestigious prize for literature in Spanish is the Cervantes Prize, presented each year at the university of Alcalá de Henares, the writer's birthplace.