December 8, 2025, marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Carmen Martín Gaite, one of the most important novelists and essayists in 20th-century Spanish literature. A prominent member of the so-called "Generation of the Fifties," she is the author of an extensive and genre-diverse body of work that, since receiving the Nadal Prize in 1957 for her novel "Entre visillos," has paved the way for Spanish literature, teaching us that the art of storytelling can also be a way of inhabiting the world together.
If anything defines Carmen Martín Gaite's literature, it is, to put it in her own words, the incessant search for an interlocutor. A dialogical impulse that can be seen in the interplay of perspectives and perspectives articulated in her novels—from the epistolary to the memoristic, from the voyeuristic to the biographical—but also in her short stories, poems, and essays. For Martín Gaite, writing was a way of conversing with the world, of exploring others, of journeying into the unknown until it became commonplace.
The issuance of this centennial commemorative stamp, illustrated by cartoonist Yeyei Gómez, is perhaps the best possible tribute to this conversational way of understanding literature. In one of her logbooks, Carmen Martín Gaite noted that "writing a letter is sending a message to the future. Speaking from the present with a recipient whose whereabouts, whereabouts, or when they will receive it are unknown." For the Salamanca-born writer, letters are a form of deferred conversation that are as valuable in our relationship with the past—a unique documentary record that allows us to write history from another perspective—as they are in our present relationships with others. The centenary of Carmen Martín Gaite is an unbeatable opportunity to continue reading, studying, and celebrating great novels such as Lo raro es vivir (The Strange Thing Is to Live), Entre visillos (Between Curtains), Nubosidad variable (Variable Cloudiness), and Caperucita en Manhattan (Little Red Riding Hood in Manhattan), but also to remember that the narrative dimension of life, rarely as evident as in epistolary writing, goes beyond the institutional realm of literature. “Life is a narrative that unfolds even if you don't write it down,” wrote a Cuaderno de todo Martín Gaite (Notebook of the Entire Series), “you are what you narrate and how you narrate it.”
