The Madrid poet, daughter of Félix Grande and Francisca Aguirre, and author of ‘El libro de Lilith’ (The Book of Lilith) and ‘Hotel para erizos’ (Hotel for Hedgehogs), dies at the age of 55.

The poet and essayist Guadalupe Grande was the only child of Félix Grande and Francisca Aguirre and the granddaughter of painter Lorenzo Aguirre.  “She was the only child in an open house, open to the world of the Flamencos and poets, ” Antonio Lucas wrote in El Mundo as a farewell to her. “A place in the world where things happened without the need to summon them. That was the space in which she began to form her own voice and her own language.  And poetry was the platform from which to launch herself furthest.”

Born in Madrid in 1965 and with a degree in Social Anthropology from the Universidad Complutense, Grande started writing poems from a very young age.  During her lifetime she published ‘El libro de Lilith’ (The Book of Lilith) (1995, Rafael Albertí Award), ‘La llave de niebla’ (2003), (The Key to the Mist) ‘Mapas de cera’ (2006) (Wax Maps) and ‘Hotel para erizos’ (2010) (Hotel for Hedgehogs).  Túa Blesa wrote about this last poetry book in El Cultural, “she had a lot to say and an unsual poetic taste. “Hotel for Hedgehogs” was a refuge from the past that lives again in the present, pressing one against the other, a meditation on time, everything is remembering and forgetting, and in this movement, the reality lived is transcended in a transfiguration that makes the words no longer just words, but notes of that music we call poetry.”

Read more here: https://elcultural.com/guadalupe-grande-la-fe-en-la-poesia