Chacón, Dulce

Spanish novelist, poet and playwright born in Zafra, Extremadura, in western Spain to an aristocratic, right wing family. Her father, an educated man with literary interests, was the Mayor of Zafra during the Franco regime. He wrote (under the pseudonym Hache) and read poetry to his family; that was how the young Dulce developed her desire to write. Her father died when she was eleven years old, and the family moved to Madrid where Dulce and her twin sister Inma (who also became an author) went to boarding school. That was where she began to write poetry influenced by, among others, the Peruvian poet César Vallejo and the German Rainer Maria Rilke.