Born in 1925, Carmen Martín Gaite was a prolific author who cultivated many different literary genres through the second half of the twentieth century, starting in 1947 with the publication of her first poem, ‘La barca nevada’, and then her first short story, ‘Desde el umbral’ the following year in Trabajos y días when she was a student at the University of Salamanca. She was subsequently identified as belonging to the group of writers known as the ‘Generación del Mediosiglo’ or ‘Generación del 50’. She worked continuously until her death in 2000, and her unfinished novel Los parentescos was published in 2001.

Like many other fiction writers of her generation, Martín Gaite began as a short-story writer, publishing her first collection, Las ataduras, in 1960 and Cuentos completos in 1978. Her first short novel, El balneario, which won the Premio Café Gijón 1954 and was published a year later, can be seen as a literary bridge between her short stories and her novels. Her first novel was Entre visillos (1958), winner of the 1957 Premio Nadal, followed by Ritmo lento (1963), a finalist in the Biblioteca Breve de Narrativa competition a year earlier. In total she published nine fulllength novels, two novellas, El balneario and Caperucita en Manhattan (1990), as well as some fiction for children.