Luis Cernuda

Luis Cernuda was born in Seville in 1902. He studied law and received encouragement from Pedro Salinas before joining the literary world associated with the Generation of ’27.

In collections including “Los placeres prohibidos” (1931) and “Donde habite el olvido” (1934), he explored desire, disappointment and the difficulty of finding a place in society. Love between men became an explicit part of that work. “La realidad y el deseo”, the title under which he gathered his poetry, named a conflict that continued through successive stages of his writing.

In 1938, during the Civil War, he travelled to Britain to lecture and did not return to Spain. Teaching took him through Britain and the United States before he settled in Mexico in 1952. His essays also engaged closely with English and French literature.

Cernuda died in Mexico City in 1963, aged sixty-one. His writing offered later readers a language for desire without requiring that it disappear behind convention or silence.