The Spanish writer Ana María Matute wrote works about misery, alienation, violence, isolation, betrayal and the loss of innocence. Nonetheless, her 88 years of life, which sadly came to an end on Thursday due to a fatal heart attack in the northeastern city of Barcelona, was marked with great achievement and success. "Los Abel" ("The Abels") and "Los Soldados Lloran de Noche" ("Soldiers Cry by Night") were among some of Matute's most renowned works, but were only two pieces of a greater assemblage of talented creations.

Matute, who was only a month away from her 89th birthday, was born and lived in Barcelona, though she spent a fair among of her childhood in Madrid. At the age of four, she was she stuck with a life-threatening illness and was made to live with her grandparents in Mansilla de la Sierra, a small town in the mountains, during her recovery period, which ultimately benefited her writing. Her times in the mountain area was reflected in the 1961 anthology "Historias de la Artamila" ("Stories about the Artamila"), which detailed the people who she met during her recovery. The town is also the setting in many other works.

The Spanish Civil War broke out when Matute was only 10 years old, and the author absorbed the conflict around her, able to deposit the streaming battle, aggression, and resulting dictatorship by Francisco Franco into her writing.

Although Matute's books were riddled with realism, she was also known for injecting myth, mystery, fantasy, and supernatural elements into her stories. The outcome of her talent was that she became one of three female members to ever be a part of the RSA (Royal Spanish Academy); she grew to be one of the best novelists of the posguerra, the period immediately following the Spanish Civil War; and she won almost all of Spain's major literary awards, including the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's highest literary honor. Other outcomes of her writing were censorship and blacklisting during the stint of Franco's regime.

"They called me irreverent, immoral, they twisted everything," she said in 2011 at an exhibition showing how official censors changed her work.

Matute and a number of her contemporaries, who were traumatized by the war, were dubbed the "generation of the frightened children." Her perspective of war-torn Spain was often from the perspective of a child.

Matute was also known for her children's books and young adult novels, such as "Los Ninos Tontos" ("The Stupid Children") and "El Verdadero Final de La Bella Durmiente" ("The True Story of Sleeping Beauty"), though she did not write at all for most of the 1970s and 1980s due to the fact that she suffered from depression. She later returned with a trilogy of medieval fantasy stories, and her final book, "Family Demon," which is due to be published this coming September.

Matute is survived by a son.

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