Spanish poet and dramatist, a talented artist, best known for his dramatic trilogy BODAS DE SANGRE, the story of a bride who runs away with a previous lover, who is subsequently murdered by her husband, YERMA, portraying the deadly conflict between a wife's maternal yearnings and her husband's sterility, and LA CASA DE BERNARDA ALBA, dealing with matriarchal domination and sexual repression. After a period of great creative activity, García Lorca was shot by Falangist soldiers in the opening days of the Spanish Civil war. In both his drama and poetry García Lorca created a delicate balance between the traditional and the modern, between folk mythology and mainstream European ideas.

"Most of the Madrid critics praised the literary and dramatic merit of Marina Pineda to an extent that surprised me. In general they asserted that it was more than just promising; it was real achievement by a playwright who brought to the theatre a technique aware of the limitations of historical drama and abundance of poetry that flowed naturally and continuously, not only from the characters but also from their surroundings. They found in it an emotional power highlighted as much in the tragic phrases of Marina Pineda as in the sweet and sorrowful worlds of the little nuns when they set out toward the scaffold. This concept of Marina Pineda is the one that satisfies me most, because I sincerely believe that theatre is not and cannot be anything but emotion and poetry - in word, action, gesture."
(García Lorca in Playwrights on Playwrighting, ed. by Toby Cole, 1961)

García Lorca was born at Fuente Vaqueros, a village on the banks of the River Genil, a few miles from Granada. His father, Federico García Rodriguez, was a successful farmer and mother, Vicenta Lorca Romero, had been a schoolteacher before becoming Federico's second wife. The author returned several times in his poetry and drama to the Moorish city of Granada in which he was raised.

García Lorca read law at the University of Granada; at the same time he studied music collaborating in the 1920s with Manuel de Falla. He lived in Madrid's intellectual hotbed, the Residence de Estudiantes, and became friends among others with the writer Juan Ramón Jiménez. He worked with Salvador Dali and Louis Bunuel in different productions. When the two made their notorious short film Un Chien Andalou (1928), García Lorca was offended: he thought that the film was about him.

Through recitals of his poetry García Lorca became known even before the publication of his first collection. As a writer García Lorca made his debut with LIBRO DE POEMAS (1921), a collection of fable like poems. In 1923 García Lorca earned a degree in law, but the turning point in his literary career was folk music festival Fiesta de Cante Jondo in 1922, where he found inspiration for his work from the traditions of folk and gypsy music.

POEMA DEL CANTE JONDO (1931, Deep Song) and PRIMER ROMANCERO GITANO (1924-1927), published in 1928, made García Lorca the poet of Andalusia. In these works the author explored the gypsy culture, ballads and mythology as a point of departure to express his tragic vision of life. In 1926 García Lorca wrote The Shoemaker's Prodigious Wife, after finishing Marina Pineda. Its first performance was in 1930. "In my Shoemaker's Wife I sought to express - within the limits of ordinary farce, and without laying hands on the elements of poetry within my reach - the struggle of reality with fantasy that exists within every human being. (By fantasy I mean everything that is unrealisable.) The shoemaker's wife fights constantly with ideas and real objects because she lives in her own world, in which every idea and object has a mysterious meaning, which she herself does not know. She has only lived and had suitors on the other bank of the river, which she cannot and will not ever be able to reach."

In 1927 García Lorca gained fame with his romantic historical play MARIANA PINEDA, where the scenery was constructed by Salvador Dali. By 1928, with the publication of PRIMER ROMANCERO GITANO, he was the best-known of all Spanish poets, and leading member of the group known as the 'Generation of 27', which included Luis Cernuda, Jorge Guillen, Pedro Salinas, Rafael Alberti and others. In 1929-30 García Lorca lived in the city of New York, on the campus of Columbia University. Unable to speak English he suffered a deep culture shock. His suicidal mood was recorded in posthumously published POETA EN NUEVA YORK (1940, Poet in New York), in which he praised Walt Whitman and homosexuality based on true love and affection.

After a short visit to Cuba, García Lorca was back in Spain by 1931, and continued with theatre productions. He became the head the travelling theatrical company, La Barraca, which brought classical plays and other dramas to the provinces. After the death of his friend, a bullfighter, Garcia Lorca wrote Lament for the Death of a Bullfighter (1935), which has been regarded by most critics as his greatest poem. The work is divided into four sections, whose individual motifs are weaved together like a baroque oratorio. The figure of one man facing death in the bullring brought to full expressive power the author's tragic sense of death.

García Lorca's experiments in the theatre - he rebelled against the realistic theatre of the middle class - involved such puppet plays as TÍTERES DE CACHIPORRA (1949) and EL RETABLILLO DE DON CRISTÓBAL (1938). In 1933 he wrote two surrealistic dramas, EL PÚBLICO, an attack on commercial theatre and the entire social order, and ASÍ QUE PASEN CINCO AÑOS, an allegory of lost time.

Love, love
that here lies is wounded.
So wounded by love's going;
so wounded,
dying of love.
Tell every one that it was just
the nightingale.
A surgeon's knife with four sharp edges;
the bleeding throat - forgetfulness.
Take me by the hands, my love,
for I come quite badly wounded,
so wounded by love's going.
So wounded.
Dying of love!
(from The Love of Don Perimplin, 1928)

Blood Wedding, the first part of García Lorca's famous rural trilogy, was performed in 1933. The love triangle, blending drama and poetry, closely resembled a classical Greek tragedy. Yerma, the second part, was performed in 1934, and focused on a barren marriage, which finally leads to a murder. The House of Bernarda, written just before García Lorca's death, depicted a tyrannical mother and his daughters.

"I am freedom because love wanted it so;
Pedro! the freedom for which you left me.
I am freedom stricken by men
Love, love, love and eternal solitudes."
(the heroine in Marina Pineda, who was executed in 19th century Spain for embroidering a revolutionary flag)

García Lorca's central themes in his works are love, pride, passion and violent death, which also marked his own life. The Spanish Civil War began in 1936 and the right-wing forces saw García Lorca as an enemy. The author hid from the soldiers but he was soon found and shot in Granada, in August 19/20 1936, without trial by the Nationalist. The circumstances of his death are still shrouded in mystery. He was buried in a grave that he had been forced top dig for himself.

For further reading: García Lorca by E. Honig (1944); Lorca and the Spanish Poetic Tradition by J.B. Trend (1956); The Theatre of García Lorca by R. Lima (1963); Lorca: Poeta maldito by F. Umbral (1968); Lorca and the Spanish Tradition by J.B. Trend (1971); García Lorca: Playwright and Poet by M. Adams (1977); The Assassination of Federico García Lorca by I. Gibson (1979); Lorca's New York Poetry by R.L. Predmore (1980); Federico Carcía Lorca by R. Anderson (1984); Federico García Lorca by F.H. Londré (1984); Federico García Lorca by I. Gibson (1989); Lorca's Late Poetry: A Critical Study by A.A. Anderson (1990); Audience and Authority in the Modernist Theater of Federico García Lorca by C.C. Soufas (1996); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 2) - Other writer in the Spanish Civil war: Ernest Hemingway, André Malraux, George Orwell, Langston Hughes - In exile during the Civil War: José Ortega y Gasset

• IMPRESIONES Y PAISAJES, 1918 - Impressions and Landscapes
• LIBRO DE POEMAS, 1921 - Book of Poems
• MARINA PINEDA, 1923 (written)
• CANCIONES, 1927 - Songs
• LA DONCELLA, EL MARINERO Y EL ESTUDIANTE, 1928 - The Virgin, the Sailor, and the Student
• EL PASEO DE BUSTER KEATON, 1928 - Buster Keaton's Promenade
• ROMANCEROM GITANO, 1928 - Gypsy Ballads
• AMOR DE DON PERLIMPLIN, 1928 - The Love of Don Perimplin with Belisa in His Garden
• LA ZAPATERA PRODIGIORA, 1930 - The Shoemaker's Marvellous Wife -
• RETABLILLO DE DON CRISTÓBAL, 1931 - Don Cristóbal
• BODAS DE SANGRE, 1933 - Blood Wedding
• YERMA, 1934 - transl.
• EL PÚBLICO, 1934 - The Audience
• LLANTO POR INGACIO SÁNCHEZ MEJÍAS, 1935 - Lament for the Death of a Bullfighter
• DONA ROSITA, 1935 - Doña Rosita, the Spinster
• SEIS POEMAS GALLEGOS, 1935
• LA CASA DE BERNARDA ALBA, 1936 - The House of Bernard Alba
• PRIMERAS CANCIONES, 1936 - First Songs
• ASÍ QUE PASEN CINCO AÑOS, 1937 - If Five Years Pass
• EL RETABLILLO DE DON CRISTÓBAL, 1938 - In the Frame of Don Cristobal
• Poems, 1939
• POETA EN NUEVA YORK, 1940 - Poet in New York
• Selected Poems, 1941
• EL DIVÁN DEL TAMARIT, 1940 - Divan
• Selected Poems, 1943
• TÍTERES DE CACHIPORRA: LA TRAGICOMEDIA DE DON CRISTÓBAL Y LA SEÑA ROSITA, 1949 - The Tragicomedy of Don Cristobal and Doña Rosita
• The Gypsy Ballads, 1954
• EL MALEFICIO DE LA MARIPOSA, 1954 - The Butterfly's Evil Spell
• Federico García Lorca: Some of His Shorter Poems, 1955
• The Selected Poems of Ferderico García Lorca, 1955
• QUÍMERA, 1957 - Chimera
• After Lorca, 1957
• Lorca (Selected Poems), 1960
• Five Plays, 1963
• Lorca and Jiménez, 1967
• García Lorca and John of the Cross, 1968
• OBRAS COMPLETAS, 1971
• Tree of Song, 1971
• Lorca and Jiménez, Selected Poems, 1973
• Divan and Other Writings, 1974
• Songs, 1976
• Lorca/Blackburn, 1979
• Deep Song and Other Prose, 1980
• The Cricket Sings, 1980 (bilingual)
• Selected Letters, 1983
• The Public and Play Without a Title, 1983
• How City Sings from November to November, 1984
• Impressions and Landscapes, 1987
• Three Plays: Blood Wedding, Doña Rosita the Spinster, Yerma, 1987
• Ode to Walt Whitman and Other Plays, 1988
• Once Five Years Pass and Other Dramatic Works, 1989
• The Poetical Works of Federico García Lorca, 1988-1991 (2 vols.)
• Federico García Lorca's Poetry in Word and Image, 1992
• Selected Poems, 1992
• Selected Verse, 1995