WithoutMemoryIWouldNotExist

Between politics and life

Intellectual and man of action. Jorge Sempún has combined both attributes during his long life. A child in the Second Spanish Republic and adolescent in the Spanish Civil War, he experience exile and deportation at an age when others are thinking of girl friends. A communist, clandestine militant, he lived a hazardous life between Spain and France. This experience and his subsequent expulsion from the Spanish Communist Party is described in Autobiografía de Federico Sánchez (Autobiography of Federico Sánchez), the book which won the Planeta publisher's prize in 1977. Federico Sánchez was his undercover alias while he was fighting Franco. In the book he also crosses swords with Santiago Carillo, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Spain. He was Minister of Culture in Felipe González's post-Franco government and experienced the rupture with the vice president, Alfonso Guerra, at first hand. He left government and politics and wrote Federico Sánchez vous salue bien (Federico Sánchez Bids you Farewell). His first novel, Le grand voyage (The Long Journey) is a beautiful story of his life in the French Resistance. Years later, he wrote his memoires of the concentration camp in L'écriture ou la vie (Writing or Life).