Arrabal has directed seven full-length feature films and has published over 100 plays; 14 novels; 800 poetry collections, chapbooks, and artists' books; several essays; and his notorious "Letter to General Franco" during the dictator's lifetime.

Forty other Transcendent Satraps have been elected over the past half-century, including Marcel Duchamp, Eugène Ionesco, Man Ray, Boris Vian, Dario Fo, Umberto Eco, and Jean Baudrillard.

Arrabal spent three years as a member of André Breton's surrealist group and was a friend of Andy Warhol and Tristan Tzara.

Deeply political and merrily playful, both revolutionary and bohemian, his work is the syndrome of our century of barbed wire and Gulags, a manner of finding a reprieve.

He was transferred between prisons, from Santi Espiritu in Melilla to Monte Hacho in Ceuta, where he attempted suicide, as well as Ciudad Rodrigo and Burgos.

In 1936, Arrabal's mother returned to Ciudad Rodrigo with her young son, Fernando, and found a job at Burgos, then-capitol of the Nationalists and headquarters of General Franco's government.

He continued his studies at Las Escuelas Pías de San Antón, a church school whose alumni have also included Victor Hugo and Jacinto Benavente y Martínez.

In 1947, when his mother ordered him to attend preparatory classes for entrance to the Academia General Militar, Arrabal protested by playing hooky.

She subsequently sent him to Tolosa (Gipuzkoa), where he studied business at the Escuela Teórico-Práctica de la Industria y el Comercio del Paper, in 1949.

In 1954, Arrabal hitchhiked to Paris to attend a performance of Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children given by the touring Berliner Ensemble.

In 1955, he was awarded a three-month scholarship to study in Paris, during which time he lived at the Colegio de España at the Cité Universitaire.

He considered this disease to be a "lucky mishap" that allowed him to move permanently to his "veritable homeland, that of Kundera and Vives, Saint Ignatius of Loyola and Picasso: exile."

In 2005, a 3-disc box set of Arrabal's films was released by Cult Epics with Viva la muerte, I Will Walk Like a Crazy Horse, and The Tree of Guernica.

One critic wrote, "Viva la muerte is an absolute masterpiece, one of the most astonishing I have seen in my lifetime" (André Pieyre de Mandiargues).

Raymond Léopold Bruckberger wrote, for Le Monde, "I prefer Arrabal to Fellini or Ingmar Bergman... he is to cinema what Rimbaud is to poetry."

Arrabal's opera Faustbal with music by Leonardo Balada premiered at the Teatro Real de Madrid on February 13, 2009, staged by the Comediants of Barcelona.

Jesús López Cobos, music director of the Teatro Real de Madrid, will conduct the world premiere, which will be sung by sopranos Ana Ibarra and María Rodríguez.

Arrabal has made over 700 artists' books in collaboration with Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Roland Topor, Julius Baltazar, Antonio Saura, Olivier O. Olivier, Maxime Godard, Jean Cortot, Jorge Camacho, Ralph Gibson, Enrico Baj, Gustavo Charif, Milan Kundera, Michel Houellebecq and others.