Carmen Martín Gaite: 25 years after her death and the centenary of her birth, a legacy more alive than ever.

It's been 25 years since the death of Spanish writer Carmen Martín Gaite , a year that also marks the centenary of her birth. And on this anniversary , the Foundation that bears her name aims to bring her work to the forefront.

The vice president of the Martín Gaite Foundation, Patricia Caprile, explained that she is a "very lively, very contemporary author , with a very simple vocabulary that reaches young people and is based on her own experience."

Born in 1925 in Salamanca (western Spain), she was the first woman to win the National Literature Prize in Spain in 1978 with her novel El cuarto de atrás , which reviewed the situation of women during the Franco dictatorship (1939-1975).

She was also awarded the Nadal Novel Prize, one of the most prestigious in Spain, for her work Entre visillos (1957).

Considered one of the best Spanish writers of the last century , one of her most notable works is Little Red Riding Hood in Manhattan (1991), a coming-of-age story written after the death of her daughter Marta at the age of 28, from pneumonia, a consequence of AIDS.

This is a coming-of-age story about Sara Allen, a 10-year-old girl who lives in Brooklyn and, emulating the story of Little Red Riding Hood, her greatest wish is to go to Manhattan alone to take her grandmother a strawberry cake.

In fact, the New York Book Fair will host a dramatized reading of this work in October of this year , which reflects the relationship between the writer and the city, which she first visited in 1979 and which left her fascinated.

In New York she read Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own and discovered Hopper's paintings, but she also found a recognition she didn't feel in Spain , where at the time she was "the wife of Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio", another of the great exponents of Spanish literature of her generation.

After his stay in New York, he returned to his country with a strength and confidence that helped him establish himself among the great male icons of his generation.

To commemorate this "gaiteano" year, the National Library of Spain will host an exhibition about the writer from October 30, 2025, to April 5, 2026, and the Instituto Cervantes' Caja de las Letras has already received her legacy , consisting of out-of-print editions, unpublished documents, childhood photos, and one of her signature berets.

In June, the Madrid Book Fair hosted a tribute to Martín Gaite , whose presence at the event was always warmly welcomed by the capital's public and which continued until the year of his death (2000), as a result of liver cancer.

Martín Gaite remains a widely read author among Spanish-speaking readers , with almost all of her work available in bookstores. She is also part of the curriculum studied by high school students in Spain for their university entrance exam.

In fact, throughout 2025, two of his most famous novels, The Back Room and Little Red Riding Hood in Manhattan, are on theatrical tour.

And for those who want to delve into the writer's intimacy, the headquarters of the Foundation that bears her name – created in 2014 by her sister Ana – is located in the family home in a town north of Madrid (El Boalo) , where the writer found refuge with her parents and sisters.