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Fernando Arrabal Spain    PWF 2010

Fernando Arrabal — legendary playwright, film director, novelist and poet — was was born in 1932, in Melilla in Spanish Morocco.

“One might describe Arrabal’s writing as a dense and unremitting wave of sperm, saliva and blood—or as a vein of red and black diamonds, the color of life, of death, and of anarchy.”

Living in Madrid—under the oppression of the Franco regime—Arrabal created his “Theater of Panic”—moving in 1954 to Paris where he entered the corridors of the Theater of the Absurd, with Ionesco and Beckett. For Arrabal—chance forces choice.

“I watched scenes onstage of sodomy, intercourse, defecation, profanity, and nudity—and found them not only acceptable, but exactly right.”

Arrabal’s plays—Guernica, And They Put Handcuffs on the Flowers, The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria, and Garden of Delights—the film Viva La Muerte—and his Letter to General Franco highlight an extraordinary career which includes over a hundred plays, fourteen novels, eight hundred poetry collections and seven feature films. His most recent works include: Like a Madmen's Heaven, Clitoris, Dictionary of Panic, Arrabal's Universe, Defense of Kundera.

“Half ex-patriot, half exile”—Fernando Arrabal lives in Paris.