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

Rosa Montero

Rosa Montero (Cesar Astudillo, 2007; WIkiCommons CC BY-SA 2.0).jpg
Rosa Montero at a book signing in Madrid (César Astudillo, 2007; via Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 2.0)

Rosa Montero (Madrid, b. 3 January 1951) is a widely-acclaimed fiction writer, essayist and journalist. As a celebrated author of the ‘boom’ of post-Franco women writers in Spain, one of the country’s most renowned female journalists, and a representative voice of the Spanish Transition to Democracy, Montero is an important cultural reference point in Hispanic literature and journalism. From age five to nine, she was unable to attend school due to tuberculosis and anaemia. During this time, Montero entertained herself at home with writing and reading, and developed a passion for literature, which she has maintained to this day. 

After completing four courses in Psychology at the Complutense University of Madrid (1969–1972), Montero obtained a degree in Journalism from the Official School of Journalism in Madrid (1970–1975). During her university years, she published columns and interviews in various reputable newspapers and magazines, such as Fotogramas, Pueblo, Posible and Hermano Lobo. Since 1976, Montero has collaborated with Spain’s leading newspaper El País, for which she has written over 2,000 literary interviews, as well as countless articles and journalistic columns. Montero was the first female editor-in-chief of the newspaper’s weekend supplement from 1981 to 1982 and served as special correspondent for El País in several countries (including Australia, India, Latin America and the USA). She has also published articles and opinion columns in various prominent international newspapers. 

In her formative years as a journalist, Montero became known for her provocative and challenging interview style, in addition to the technique of incorporating her own subjective perspective and unmasking the façade behind the celebrity interviewee. A politically committed journalist, Montero’s newspaper articles and editorial columns stand out not only for their ironic humour and sharp critical perspective but also for the deployment of a generically hybrid style, which infuses journalism with literary elements. Although Montero aligns broadly with a leftist political ideology, in her early journalism, she criticised the political parties of the Transition and early democratic period and the lack of social, economic and cultural progress in Spain at that time. Montero continues to use her journalistic platform to denounce patriarchal power structures, as well as human rights violations, racism, war, unbridled capitalism and ecological destruction, and to draw attention to the plight of marginalized and oppressed sectors of society, including animals, the elderly, immigrants, and the poor.

After making a name for herself as a journalist, Montero arrived on the literary scene at the age of 28 with the publication of her first novel, the female-centred testimonial chronicle of the Transition, Crónica del desamor (1979). Since then, her journalistic career has run parallel to her vocation as a fiction writer, and she has received great acclaim and notoriety in both fields. Her fictional output has been consistent, prolific and heterogeneous. To date, she has published 19 novels, a volume of short stories, eight compilations of literary journalism (including travel writing, literary criticism, biographies, literary interviews, columns and reportage), and four children’s books. She has also written several prologues to classic literary texts.

Since the publication of her opera prima, Montero has progressively incorporated a range of (sub)genres into her novelistic production, including the Bildungsroman, novela negra, romance, the historical novel, fantasy, autobiography, autofiction, personal essay and science fiction, among others. She also blends various genres within the same text. This generic mixing represents an important part of Montero’s stylistic repertoire, making it difficult to place this multi-faceted author in a conventional generic category. Her writing style is engaging, vivid and accessible. From a narratological perspective, many of her novels contain various narrative layers, embedded texts, and female narrators who are writers. These female characters search for an identity that does not subscribe to the traditional gender roles of the patriarchal society of Francoist and post-Franco Spain. Montero’s fiction blurs the boundaries between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, reality and fantasy, and incorporates metafiction, humour, irony, parody, collage, the hyper-real and grotesquery. In her autofictional texts, she engages in ludic, fictional self-representations, and metafictional reflections on the creative writing process. Although Montero experiments stylistically with different genres, various themes constantly reappear in her texts. These include: power and the abuse of power; fanaticism and dogmatism; memory and identity as artificial constructs; the relationship with, and need for, the Other; salvation through art; love; survival; the passage of time; death; and the meaning of life. 

Many of Montero’s novels are bestsellers and she has received numerous prestigious awards for both journalism and literature, including the National Prize for Journalism (1980), the Madrid Press Association Prize (2005), the VII José Luis Sampedro Prize (2016) and the National Prize for Spanish Literature (2017) for her literary trajectory to date. Such is her acclaim that she obtained an honorary doctorate from the University of Puerto Rico (2010), she was appointed Honorary Professor of the Department of Humanities at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru (2018), and she is an Honorary Member of the University of Malaga. In 2019, a lecture theatre was named in her honour in the Faculty of Journalism at the Miguel Hernández University of Elche (Alicante).

In addition to her incursions into journalism and literature, Montero has contributed to other media. During her university years, she participated in avant-garde independent theatre groups. She wrote a feature film script, La vieja dama and a script for the acclaimed Spanish television series, Media naranja, which was aired in 1987 and was awarded the Martín Fierro de Televisión Prize in Argentina the following year for the best foreign series. Montero also assisted with a stage production for an opera based on her science fiction dystopian novel, Temblor (1994). In 2013, she was the presenter of Dictadoras, a series for Argentinian television about the wives of dictators. Montero gives lectures and courses on both journalism and the novel and participates in conferences and symposiums at colleges, universities and other cultural institutions throughout Europe, Latin America and the United States. Several of her novels have been adapted into films, comic books and art installations, and performed as plays and operas, and her fiction has been translated into more than 20 languages, including five novels into English.

Compiled by Deirdre Kelly (Dublin)