MADRID – Spanish prize-winning and politically committed novelist Jorge Semprún, who was also a scriptwriter, French Resistance fighter and concentration camp survivor, has died at the age of 87.
Spain’s culture ministry, which he headed from 1988-91, said Semprún died late on Tuesday at his Paris home.
As well as being nominated for two Oscars for his work in film, Semprún had the rare distinction of winning top awards for novels he wrote in Spanish and French.
He was born in Madrid in 1923, and fled with his family to Paris in 1936 after a military coup aided by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.
Semprún joined the French Resistance to German occupation during the second World War. He was captured and sent to Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany, where he remained until it was liberated by US troops in 1945.
His deportation and imprisonment later became the basis of an autobiographical novel recently re-edited in English as The Cattle Truck. Semprún was active in politics for much of his life.
He joined the Spanish Communist Party and undertook clandestine missions in Spain during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. He turned to writing after he was expelled from the party in the 1960s, and was nominated for the Academy Awards as a screenwriter for the Alain Resnais-directed 1966 film The War is Over and Costa-Gravas’s 1969 movie Z. – (Reuters)