The world of books mourns the writer Michel del Castillo: the author of several successful novels and essays including Tanguy (1957) – inspired by his own story – died in Sens (Yonne), Tuesday December 17, 2024, at the age of 91, his relatives announced to AFP.
Author of some 45 books, mostly novels, including his latest, Expulsionpublished in 2018, he received the booksellers and Deux Magots prize in 1973 for The Night Windthe Renaudot in 1981 for The Night of the Decreethe RTL-Read for The crime of the fathers (1993), the Femina-essay for Colette, a certain France (1999) and the Mediterranean for its Spain lovers dictionary (2005).
A romantic life
Michel Janicot del Castillo, his real name, was born on August 2, 1933, in Madrid, to a Spanish mother and a French father. Abandoning his wife and child, the latter returned to France on the eve of the Spanish Civil War.
Close to the Republicans, his mother, Candida, spent a year in prison then took refuge with her son in the late 1930s in France. Her former husband, from whom she constantly asks for money, denounces her to the authorities as an “undesirable foreigner” and has her interned, with Michel, in a refugee camp in Mende (Lozère), with harsh living conditions.
Candida herself delivers the little boy to the German police in exchange for her own freedom. He was sent in 1942 to work farms in Germany until the end of World War II.
A rich career
He found a little respite in a Jesuit school in Andalusia where he discovered literature, before being taken in by an uncle and his wife in Paris, beginning studies of letters and psychology and starting to write.
In addition to fiction and a little theater, Michel del Castillo, for whom a school in Mende is named, is the author of essays such as Algeria, ecstasy and blood (2002) or The time of Franco (2008).
Our “Literature” file
Member of the honorary committee of the Association for the Right to Die with Dignity, he spent a large part of his life in Provence, near Nîmes.
