Marilar Aleixandre
(María Pilar Jiménez Aleixandre - Madrid, 1947)

I miss all the cities and towns where I have lived: Ceuta (the lemon tree in our yard); Doña Mencía (setting out at dawn with my father to eat figs); Madrid (Areneros' film club where I first saw "Freaks"); Vigo (the blooming mimosas in December); Santiago de Compostela if I were ever to leave it, and even other cities where I never or just briefly have lived: Donostia, Perugia, Boston. Thanks to Ramón Facal I have a very particular relationship with Toba, Cee and with the Costa da Morte (Death's Coast) the imaginary landscape from some of my books as "The lame ant" and "Wolfs in the islands", and I belong to the Literary Battalion from the Death's Coast.

I was fortunate to receive a good rock'n'roll upbringing attending Ángel Álvarez's "Caravana" in the late 60s; in the week days I studied Biology, and I came to establish a rather intense relationship with beetles. In the first 70s I began to teach Science, what allow me to buy a motorbike. Now I teache Science Education and Environmental Education in the University of Santiago de Compostela.

Some people believe that writers lead an adventurous life, but I never travelled on a sledge through the Arctic, although I hope to do it some day. Waiting for it I write poems, short stories and novels.

I learned to write -besides reading- by writing pamphlets and articles for journals of underground parties (all of them, when I was studying). My first short story was a vampires' tale, later reworked as "Waiting for the bats" (in "Anthology of Galician fear stories" Galaxia 1996), but I lingered a long time before publishing "The lame ant". Then came "The Pacific Expedition", based on a real journey, which received the Galician Critics' Literary Award in 1995 alternating with fiction for adults: "Grammarians' Passageway" a story about Santiago Pilgrims, and "Wolfs in the islands" (Xerais 1996, in Spanish Lumen 2001). My last book for youngs, "The band without a future" received the Lazarillo Award in 1998. To write makes possible to let others enter into worlds that we imagine.