Diego Medrano Fernández (Oviedo, Spain, 1978) is a Spanish poet, narrator and regular columnist of Asturian newspaper El Comercio.
Begins philosophy studies in the Universidad de Oviedo, where, "after feeling like Oscar Wilde in prison", and telling himself a certain quote by Francois Mauriac -"Freedom and health are the same thing"- he soon leaves everything for the sake of his cyclopean literary vocation.
This novel was surrounded in controversy for constituting the solid monologue of a decadent mentally ill writer facing a love process, a surprising novel, tinged by the use of a most peculiar and deconstructive syntax and a not less provoking language.
Instructions for lovers, beggars and murderers) (Cahoba Narrativa) which is the sum of over 300 micro-stories and over 600 characters, filled with quotes and "illuminations", where he followed the composition processes of Robert Walser and his Mikrogramme (Micrograms).
In 2007, with La soledad no tiene edad (Loneliness Has No Age) (Septem), Diego Medrano combines extensive and short stories, the titles of which should give an accurate orientation: Bragas (Panties), Nembutal, Urinarios (Urinals), Mahou, Atapuerca, Sirenas (Sirens)... 272 pages for readers ready for everything.
Between Oficio de tinieblas 5 (Trade of Darkness 5) by Camilo José Cela –for searching a new and unruly order in literature- and the Petites Poemes en Prose (Little Poems in Prose) by Charles Baudelaire –for their poetic nature concentrated in the minimal narrative structure- comes Medrano's "El hombre entre las rocas".
On the other hand, always in the monstruous territories, the author fantasizes with all kinds of cultural references, in a novísimical or horrifying turn: poem dedicated to Mozart learning to play the piano, different approximations to Giacometti, bombings over Guernika, tributes to Capote and Michaux, fascination for Ezra Pound.
In a very personal metric and rhythm, he created this "textual wakefulness", as he refers to it himself, in one of his many other fugues of other books with which he was occupied at that moment, without any other calm or polarity than to go on getting lost.
With portico by Pere Gimferrer, this book of poetic aphorisms or emphatic flashes belongs to the most authentic Medrano, always in permanent crisis.
He thought of committing suicide and, with the sole purpose of avoiding it, he started writing a little poem every ten or fifteen minutes: he had the intuition that this would be the only way he could reach the dawn alive, that this and no other was the valid formula to survival.
It was greeted by Pere Gimferrer, literary director of Seix Barral as a new wave of fresh wind in contemporary young narrative.
With a bit of metaliterature, a lot of tragedy, complete "esperpento", black or medranic mass and the green urine of fools, the author managed to make an endless number of critics doubt, who did not know in what limits to frame this text.
Hunger, poverty, a miserable and sleazy pension in Hortaleza Street, mysterious death threats in the dirty mirror of a ruined bathroom, a celebrated woman of the Café Gijón, Francisco Umbral, his books, his work, his thoughts... What else does a young man need to reach the artist he has inside?
Samuel Lamata arrived to Madrid to dedicate himself exclusively to writing, to triumph in literature, but specially to spy on Umbral and to turn this city into a literary character.
This book, presented by Javier Tomeo and Pere Gimferrer in Barcelona, happened to have a brilliant reception by a great number of young people.
It's amazing, how many quotes he operates with in the texts: cult characters in total marginality, a revision of high culture in the worst trances.
Surviving can be amusing is a cocktail where sensibility, anger, prodigious observation and imagination skills, which we should gulp down in some exclusive bar in company of a werewolf.