María de la Almudena Grandes Hernández (7 May 1960 – 27 November 2021) was a Spanish writer. Author of 14 novels and three short-story collections, her work has been translated into twenty languages and frequently adapted to film. She won the National Literature Prize for Narrative and the Prix Méditerranée among other honors. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called her "one of the most important writers of our time." Early life and career Almudena Grandes was born on 7 May 1960 in the Chamartín neighborhood of Madrid, Spain. She began writing when she was nine and obtained a degree in Geography and History at the Complutense University of Madrid. Following her degree, she started out writing texts for encyclopedias. Drawing on her experiences during the Movida Madrileña, she published her first novel Las edades de Lulú in 1989, an erotic and unbridled novel which achieved great success and won La Sonrisa Vertical prize, having been translated into twenty languages thus far. Director Bigas Luna made a film out of her novel, The Ages of Lulu, starring Javier Bardem. Emilie L. Bergmann said, the novel "represented a breakthrough for eroticism in women's writing" having sold more than 1.5 million copies worldwide. Her second novel Te llamaré Viernes was published in 1991 and was adapted for cinema by Gerardo Herrero in 1996. That year, she also published Modelos de mujer. The publication of her third novel, Malena es un nombre de tango, in 1994 was also a great success. Later she published Atlas de geografía humana in 1998 (which was transformed into a film by Azucena Rodríguez), Los aires difíciles, in 2002, Castillos de cartón in 2004 and El corazón helado in 2007. In 2010 she published the novel Inés y la alegría, the first in a series of six novels entitled Episodios de una Guerra Interminable. This novel narrates episodes of the anti-Francoist resistance. With Inés y la alegría, she won the "Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz" literature prize. It was followed by El lector de Julio Verne in 2012, Las tres bodas de Manolita (2014) and Los pacientes del doctor García in 2017, the latter of which led her to win the National Literature Prize for Narrative. Her last finished novel, La madre de Frankenstein, was published in 2020. In it, she contemplated the life of Aurora Rodríguez Carballeira, a woman in 20th-century Spain who shot her own daughter