Overview

For nearly three decades acclaimed Spanish poet Luis García Montero and his wife, the best-selling Spanish novelist Almudena Grandes, formed an extraordinary partnership grounded in their shared passion for literature, political activism and for each other. When Grandes died in November 2021, 15 months after being diagnosed with breast cancer, it was front page news across a shocked nation. These poems, written during his wife's illness and just after her death, narrate a journey of love and grief, but ultimately of acceptance, gratitude and hope as the poet looks back at those wrenching months with the profound realization that he would remember them ""as the happiest of my life."" At this moment of greatest loss, García Montero has produced some of the most powerful writing of his long career. In One Year and Three Months, Luis García Montero reckons with the illness and death of his wife of 30 years, Almudena Grandes, an award-winning novelist. Step by step, the poems, beautifully rendered in Katie King's masterful translations, grapple with memory and loss, and convey their struggle as a battle ""in the final trenches of our hearts."" While the poet maintains that ""death now, I confess / and speak the truth, / is not a literary matter,"" it is precisely in these moving and powerful poems that García Montero gives expression to his mourning and makes it so intensely personal and intimate that readers feel and share the deep sense of loss. --Anthony L. Geist

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9781969317026

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Reviews

In One Year and Three Months, Luis García Montero reckons with the illness and death of his wife of 30 years, Almudena Grandes, an award-winning novelist. Step by step, the poems, beautifully rendered in Katie King's masterful translations, grapple with memory and loss, and convey their struggle as a battle ""in the final trenches of our hearts."" While the poet maintains that ""death now, I confess / and speak the truth, / is not a literary matter,"" it is precisely in these moving and powerful poems that García Montero gives expression to his mourning and makes it so intensely personal and intimate that readers feel and share the deep sense of loss. --Anthony L. Geist

Author Information

Luis García Montero is one of Spain's foremost contemporary literary figures: poet, scholar, novelist, essayist, script writer, lyricist and since 2018 director of Spain's Cervantes Institute. He helped forge a literary movement called ""the poetry of experience,"" drawing on personal history and everyday language to craft universal motifs of depth and complexity. García Montero's foundational poetry collections include Habitaciones separadas (Separate Rooms), winner of Spain's National Poetry Prize, and La intimidad de la serpiente (The Intimacy of the Serpent), winner of the National Critics Award and Un año y tres meses (One Year and Three Months), winner of the 2022 Madrid Critic's Prize. In 2024, García Montero was honored with Mexico's International Carlos Fuentes Award for his lifetime contribution to Spanish language literature. Katie King is a journalist and literary translator who holds a PhD in Hispanic Studies from the University of Washington in Seattle. Her book translations include A Form of Resistance (Doolittle Project Publishing 2015) and Someone Speaks Your Name (Swan Isle Press 2021), both by Luis García Montero and My Clavicle, by Marta Sanz (Unnamed Press 2025). As a journalist, she has lived and worked in Spain, Mexico, Central America and Brazil as well as London, New York and Washington, DC.

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