For over seventy years now Spanish novelists have struggled to turn their country's most recent civil war into literature. This task has not been easy. They have had to work under changing but always problematic circumstances that posed significant obstacles and burdened them with unusually heavy responsibilities. First, there was the war itself, which broke out in July 1936 after a group of right-wing army officers tried and failed to overthrow the left-wing government of the Popular Front. From the very beginning of the conflict, writers found that they themselves and their work were being used as propaganda in support of the war effort by one side or the other: the government (also known as the Republican or Loyalist camp) or the rebellious military (who called themselves Nationalists). The latter declared victory on 1 April 1939.

Next came the long dictatorship of Francisco Franco (1939–75). Characterized by censorship, repression, and enforced exile, as well as by the centralized imposition of a self-serving version of Spanish history, the Franco regime had a direct, and mostly negative, impact on literary production and distribution. At the same time, the severe restrictions placed by the state on Civil War historiography saddled novelists both inside Spain and abroad with an additional burden: many felt obliged to turn their art into the kind of faithful representation of the past that would normally be the task of an historian.

Finally, the dictator's death in 1975 and the transition to democracy three years later did not make things much easier. While the transition did liberate novelists from the restrictions of Francoist censorship, Spain's political class collectively decided to ignore the conflicts of the past, combining a blanket amnesty with a self-imposed form of political amnesia. Many Francoist officials kept their positions; none was held accountable for actions and complicities either during the war or after it; difficult questions about the country's past were not asked, let alone answered. This meant that, once again, the novel, together with the cinema, emerged as a crucial venue for representing and explaining the war to the larger public – and, where possible, for settling accounts, coming to terms with the past, and opening the way towards true reconciliation.

Daunting numbers on a daunting topic

In spite of these difficulties, hundreds of novelists have given it a try, and dozens more have made writing about 1936–39 their life's work.