100 Heroes: Vicente Aleixandre
The gay man who won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Vicente Aleixandr was a poet who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1977.
He is recognised for representing the renewal of Spanish culture between WWI and WWII.
Life and work
Born in 1898, in Seville, Aleixandre's early poetry is highly surrealistic.
His poetry praises the beauty of nature by using symbols that represent the earth and the sea.
Many of Aleixandre's early poems are filled with sadness. They reflect his feeling that people have lost the passion and free spirit that he saw in nature.
The melancholia of his poetry was also the melancholy of failed or ephemeral love affairs.
Aleixandre celebrates love as a natural, ungovernable force that breaks down all human limitations - he criticises the conventionalism with which society attempts to conquer love.
Aleixandre died in 1984, aged 86.
The men
Aleixandre didn't discuss his sexuality publicly, but his contemporaries described his as bisexual.
A significant relationship was with the poet Carlos Bousoño.
