Jose Camilo Cela, Spain's grand old man of letters, dies aged 85

Jose Camilo Cela, Spain's grand old man of letters who won the Nobel prize for literature in 1989, has died from heart failure, aged 85.

Cela was a flamboyant and polemical giant on Spain's literary scene but many critics reckon he never surpassed his two great early novels: The Family of Pascual Duarte (1942) and The Hive (1951).

The works describe the privations, material and spiritual, suffered by ordinary folk during Franco's dictatorship. Cela combined a brutally direct style, tremendismo, with a poetic lyricism that enabled the books to transcend their country of origin and the historical moment they describe.

The Nobel citation likened Cela to Cervantes, and Pascual Duarte is the most widely translated Spanish work after Cervantes' Don Quixote.

Cela's novels were initially banned in Spain and were first published in Buenos Aires. But he himself worked for Franco's draconian censors during the 1940s, a lapse for which critics and rivals never forgave him.

He became embroiled in a plagiarism scandal in the 1990s. A Galician housewife, Carmen Formosa, who submitted an unpublished novel for the Planeta prize, was astonished to find the winning work, by Cela, bore striking similarities to her own.

She sued him amid a furore widely aired in the Spanish press, which published detailed comparisons of the two works. Cela robustly denied plagiarism and the case continues. In a curious echo, Cela's speech at a conference last October on the Spanish language was found to be identical to that given in Mexico four years earlier, itself a copy of one he gave in 1992. He said he need not apologise for defending the glories of his mother tongue.

The typically polemical dedication in my 1976 edition of Pascual Duarte reads "To my enemies, who have helped me so much in my career." He condemned Spain's prestigious Cervantes prize as "politicised and covered in shit", but accepted it in 1996. He considered himself a ladykiller, and in 1989 left his wife for a writer 40 years his junior, whom he eventually married.