Carlos Casares Mouriño

A year later, Casares won the Galaxia literary prize, on the 25th anniversary of this publishing group.

Due to this fact, he was acknowledged as one of the most innovative and significant emerging voices of Galician narrative prose.

Carlos Casares Mouriño was born in Ourense on 24 August 1941 and died in Nigrán on 9 March 2002.

He was a Galician language writer.

Carlos Casares was born in Ourense into a middle-class family in 1941.

When he was three years old, his family moved to Xinzo de Limia, where his father was a teacher, thus spending his early years in this Galician rural area.

He got close to Galician language, the main language he would be in contact with in the area except for his mother, who spoke Spanish.

His family had strong religious beliefs, and, in fact, some of his relatives were priests and one was an archbishop.

Due to his family's religiosity, he was sent to the Seminary in Ourense, where he received humanistic education between 1952 and 1957.

During those years, he experienced enormous repression for being a speaker of Galician language.

This stimulated a nonconformist spirit that led him to his first literary involvement, a clandestine magazine called El Averno.

Because of this, Carlos left the Seminary and self-studied the last years of Secondary Education.

He consequently had a lot of free time to begin his literary creation.

Winning a literary prize in Ourense gave him the possibility of meeting Galician intellectual Vicente Risco.

Afterwards, he started attending the talks Risco gave in "Café Parque".

After finishing his studies, Casares established himself in Santiago de Compostela and there he began his college studies in Philosophy and Languages.

He did so between the years 1961 and 1967, specialising in Romanic philology.

At University, he met Arcadio López-Casanova and, thanks to him, Ramón Piñeiro, thus involving in the centre of the Galician cultural movement against caudillo Francisco Franco.

However, it was not all reduced to cultural activity.

Carlos Casares became part of ADE (Asociación Democrática de Estudiantes, Democratic Student Association), and FELIPE (Frente de Liberación Popular, People's Liberation Front).

This is where, in the writer's words, he "discovered Marxism and felt like a Marxist".

During those university years, he did not forget his literary work either.

In 1965, he published several tales in Grial magazine.

In 1967, his first novel, Vento Ferido (Wounded Wind), came out, published by Galaxia in its Illa Nova collection.

When he finished his university studies, he came back to Xinzo and started searching for a job as a teacher.

He tried to achieve a position in Ourense, but he finally got it in Viana do Bolo, as an assistant teacher in the school "Colegio Libre Asociado".

There he underwent some conflicts with the school's principal because he organised certain activities the Francoist State did not approve of.

Due to this fact, he was forbidden to teach in Galicia by the Vice-chancellor of Santiago University.

He emigrated to Biscay, in the Basque Country, and taught there, but he returned after a short period of time because of external causes.

When returning from this trip, he met Kristina Berg, a Swedish girl who would eventually become his wife.

Carlos visited Sweden frequently and discovered there its open, democratic and advanced society.

Sweden was also the place where his children (Hakan and Christian) were born.

In 1974, public examinations were held in Galicia, and Carlos achieved a position as a Spanish language teacher in a school in Cangas do Morrazo.

However, he was reprimanded a short time after that, along with Méndez Ferrín, Alonso Montero and Francisco Rodríguez.

He also wrote essays studying Galician intellectuals, like Otero Pedrayo, Vicente Risco or Curros Enríquez, and became the youngest member of the Real Academia Galega (Royal Galician Academy) in 1977.

Despite all the work he did as an essayist, Carlos Casares did not forget literature, and continued publishing some highly welcomed narrative works.

He wrote Os escuros soños de Clío (1979); Ilustrísima (1980) and, after leaving his career as a member of parliament, also Os mortos daquel verán (1987), Deus sentado nun sillón azul (1996) and O sol do verán (2002).

Carlos Casares was part of Galician political life during the years of the democratic transition to democracy after Franco's death.

He was one of the instigators of a manifest called Realidade Galega (Galician reality), whose objective was achieving a Statute of Autonomy for Galicia similar to that of Catalonia and the Basque Country.

Carlos Casares and his friend and partner Ramón Piñeiro were therefore at the forefront of Galician politics at the time.