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Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing (CCWW)

Marta Sanz

Marta_Sanz (José M. Ciordia WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0).jpg
Marta Sanz, 1967 (José M. Ciordia via Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 3.0)

Marta Sanz was born in Madrid in 1967, but spent most of her childhood in the coastal resort of Benidorm, returning to Madrid as a teenager. She completed a PhD thesis on Spanish poetry during the country’s transition to democracy (1975-1986), and has worked in academia and as editor of cultural magazine Ni hablar.

Her first novel, El frío, was published in 1995. She has since published ten other novels, including Susana y los viejos, which was a runner-up for the prestigious Premio Nadal in 2006, the critically acclaimed Daniela Astor y la caja negra (2013) and Farándula (2015), awarded the Herralde Prize. She has also published two volumes of poetry, Perra mentirosa/Hardcore (2010) and Vintage (2013), as well as the essay No tan incendiario (2014).

As a writer, Sanz is concerned with exploring and uncovering the ideological dimension and power of cultural representations and, indeed, of language. Her writing style is characterised by its playfulness, irony and, at times, corrosive sarcasm. While her work pushes linguistic and generic boundaries – for instance, in her novels Black black black and Un buen detective no se casa jamás, which are part homage, part parody of the noir genre and feature Arturo Zarco, a gay hyperaesthete detective, as their protagonist – Sanz’s literary experimentation always goes hand in hand with a concern for social and political issues, including gender and inequality.

Compiled by Maite Usoz de la Fuente (Leicester)