José Luis Sampedro

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José Luis Sampedro
Real Academia Española
In office
2 June 1991 – 8 April 2013
Preceded byManuel Halcón [es]
Succeeded byManuel Gutiérrez Aragón

José Luis Sampedro Sáez (Barcelona, 1 February 1917 – Madrid, 8 April 2013[1]) was a Spanish economist and writer who advocated an economy "more humane, more caring, able to help develop the dignity of peoples". Academician of the

Spanish Literature National Prize (2011).[2] He became an inspiration for the anti-austerity movement in Spain.[3]

Biography

In 1917, the year of his birth, his family moved to

Guadalajara, Castilla-La Mancha and Huete (Cuenca). After the war, he was again called up and served in the garrison of the Spanish enclave of Melilla in North Africa.[5]

After the war he obtained work as a customs officer in Santander before moving to Madrid, where, in 1944 he married Elizabeth Pellicer before completing his university studies in Economics in 1947, winning, in the process, the award of an "Extraordinary Prize".

Thereafter he started working with a major Spanish

theatrical play
A place to live (1955).

Around 1965 and 1966 there was a purge of prominent university professors in Spain including the philosopher

visiting professor at the Universities of Salford and Liverpool in North West England
.

Along with other teachers, Sampedro created the Spanish Center for Studies and Research (CEISA), a symbol of intellectual independence which would be closed in Francoist Spain three years later. In 1968 he was appointed as Anna Howard Shaw lecturer at Bryn Mawr College for women in Philadelphia USA

On his return to Spain he requested a

socialist senator
a post he held until 1979.

In parallel to his professional activity as an economist, he published several novels and continued to write after his official retirement, achieving great successes with works like October, October, Etruscan smile or Old siren. Sadly, his literary successes coincided with the tragic news of the death of his wife, Isabel Pellicer, in 1986.

In 1990 he was appointed member of the Royal Spanish Academy, the definitive authority on the Castilian Spanish where his heterodox inaugural address, From the border [6] related to the subject of his novel The old siren, published that same year, which can be considered a Spanish hymn to life, love and tolerance.

In 2003 the widowed Sampedro was remarried to the writer, poet and translator es:Olga Lucas in the spa town of Alhama de Aragón. Thereafter he spent part of the year on Tenerife, in the Canary Islands a place of myths whose symbols, the Dracaena draco tree, is supposedly home to the Tenerife blue chaffinch of the volcanic peak of Mount Teide which inspired him to write The path of the dragon tree.

He exercised his critical humanism about what he viewed as the moral and social disruption arising from Western style Neoliberalism and Capitalism. In reference to this, he added his grain of sand to the Anti-austerity movement in Spain during May 2011 by writing the preface to the Spanish edition of the book Time for Outrage by the French diplomat Stéphane Hessel.

Sampedro died on April 8, 2013, in Madrid, aged 96 years old.

Awards

In 2002 Sampedro was appointed honorary non-executive chairman of the Spanish telecommunications company Sintratel, along with Nobel prizewinner José Saramago. Sintratel is a skit on sin trabajo telecoms or telecommunications workers without work.[7]

In 2008, he was awarded the Medal of the

Principality of Andorra. In April 2009 he was invested as Doctor Honoris Causa of the University of Seville
.

In 2010 was awarded the XXIV Menéndez Pelayo International Prize for his "many contributions to human thought" as, variously, an economist, writer and teacher. Additionally, the Spanish Council of Ministers awarded Sampedro the Order of Arts and Letters of Spain on 2 November 2010 for "his outstanding literary career and his thought committed to the problems of his time". In 2011, he received the Premio Nacional de las Letras Españolas.

On May 24, 2012 was invested Doctor Honoris Causa by the University of Alcalá near Madrid.[8]

Aranjuez

Route followed by wood transporters of the Tagus River in The river that leads...

In his novel Royal Site, Sampedro takes a tour of the Royal Palace of Aranjuez and its gardens. echoing the sentiments o the geographer es:Thomas Lopez. That Aranjuez is the real and true center of Spain. Aranjuez is also the final terminal of a route followed by timber rafters floating timber to the sawmills along the Rio Tajo in the novel A river that leads.

His is celebrated locally in the José Sampedro Centro de

Educación de Adultos
and a conference room of the municipal cultural center.

Works

Novels

Los círculos del tiempo trilogy:

  1. Octubre, octubre (1981),
  2. La vieja sirena (1990),
  3. Real Sitio (1993),

Stand-alones:

Short stories

Collections:

Uncollected short stories:

Plays

Poems

Non-fiction

Economy
Autobiographies
Others

Adaptations

See also

References

External links