José Manuel Caballero Bonald wove the profile of his life in his work. In it the autobiographical and the historical, the individual and the national, complement each other. As he points out in the introduction to his poetry book Selección natural (Natural Selection, 1983), he himself can find many forgotten facts of his own biography by searching his work. Likewise, the reader just flipping through and reading some of Bonald's poems can experience the strength with which this man poured into his writing the amalgam of situations, knowledge, and feelings that make up a life.

Son of a Cuban father, Placido Caballero, and a French mother, Julia de Bonald, José Manuel Caballero Bonald was born on 11 November 1926 in Jérez de la Frontera, Spain. When he was nine, the Spanish Civil War broke out, and in some of his works, the ones in which...