His father, José María Semprún Gurrea (1893–1966), was a liberal politician and served as a diplomat for the Republic of Spain during the Spanish Civil War.

In the wake of the military uprising led by General Franco in July 1936, the Semprún family moved to France, and then to The Hague where his father was a diplomat, representing the Republic of Spain in the Netherlands.

During the Nazi occupation of France, the young Semprún joined the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans – Main-d'Œuvre Immigrée (FTP-MOI), a Resistance organization made up mostly of immigrants.

[4] He deals with the experiences in two books: Le grand voyage (1963) treats the journey to Buchenwald, and Quel beau dimanche!

[8] In 1988 he was appointed Minister of Culture in Felipe González's second government, despite being neither an elected MP nor a member of the Socialist Party (PSOE).

In 1996, Semprún became the first non-French author to be elected to the Académie Goncourt, which awards an annual prize for literature written in French.

In 2002, he was awarded the inaugural Ovid Prize in recognition of his entire body of work, which focuses on "tolerance and freedom of expression".

In 2001, while giving a conference at the Lycée Frédéric Mistral in Avignon, France, he inspired young Pablo Daniel Magee to become a writer.

2 of the NKVD, and then largely razed and planted over by East Germany to hide the mass graves from this second dark episode.

During the long trip, the narrator provides the reader with flashbacks to his experiences in the French Resistance and flash-forwards to life in the camp and after liberation.

In spite of the pseudonymous title, the work is Semprún's least fictionalized volume of autobiography,[12] recounting his life as a member of the central committee of the Spanish Communist Party (PCE), and his undercover activities in Spain between 1953 and 1964.

The book shows a stark view of Communist organizations during the Cold War, and presents a very critical portrait of leading figures of the PCE, including Santiago Carrillo and Dolores Ibárruri.

In part, Semprún was inspired by A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and the work contains criticism of Stalinism as well as fascism.