Leopoldo María Panero

Leopoldo María Panero, one of the most influential poets of 20th century Spain, was born in 1948 in Madrid to Leopoldo Panero, who was one of the favored poets of Franco’s Fascist regime. He showed precocious talent from an early age and also soon rebelled against his parents’ politics, serving a brief jail sentence in 1965 for participation in a communist-backed demonstration.

Because his mother observed signs of schizophrenia, and because she thought his homosexuality (which became apparent during his stay in jail) might be “cured,” she put him under psychiatric care, including electroshock treatments, an experience that would haunt him the rest of his life, which he would spend in and out of various asylums and institutions.

Despite the trauma inflicted by the institutions, he went on to write dozens of well-respected books of poetry, fiction, essays, very few of which have been translated into English. He died, just as interest in his work was enjoying a resurgence, in 2014.

(Adapted from the Introduction to The Death of Poetry, by Arturo Mantecón.)

Panero on Wikipedia (English)

Panero on Wikipedia (Spanish, much more extensive)

Obituary in El Pais (English)

Wikipedia article on Leopold María’s father