Alfredo Conde

Biography

Alfredo Conde studied navigation and history and has worked as a merchant seaman and as a history teacher. He was an independent MP and Minister of Culture in the regional Galician government during the late 1980s, and also the first president of the Galician PEN Club. He is best known for his fiction, written in both the Galician and Spanish languages. His novel The Griffon won the Spanish National Book Award, the Blanco Amor Prize for novels and the prestigious Grinzane Cavour Prize for best foreign fiction. His novel The Other Days received one of Spain’s oldest literary awards, the Premio Nadal. Another of his novels, Romasanta: Uncertain Memoirs of the Galician Wolfman, has been made into a film.

Synopsis

Romasanta: Uncertain Memoirs of the Galician Wolfman (158 pages) retells the story of Spain’s first documented serial killer, Manuel Blanco Romasanta, who had previously been portrayed as a travelling salesman who attacked his victims without being aware of what he was doing. Owing to a complicated court case and some scientific quackery, the defendant was eventually pardoned by Isabella II of Spain. Alfredo Conde, a descendant of one of the doctors involved in the case, chose to portray him as a merciless killer who was out to get rich in a book that was later made into a film, Romasanta: The Werewolf Hunt (2004).

Sample

My name is Manuel Blanco Romasanta. As I sit down to write these memoirs I am about to turn forty-three. In my part of the world I am known as O Tendeiro, the salesman, but I shall go down in history as The Wolf Man. Of that I am positive. Nevertheless, the mob, the greatest simpletons, who may also be the shrewdest, will go on calling me in Galician “O Homo de Unto”, as well as “O Saca Manteigas”, the man who sucks human fat.

Regueiro lies near Esgos. It is a small place, not even a small village, located just down from the church at Santa Baia, from where Regueiro, as well as the parishes of de Sontelo and A Lama, have always been administered. My home, the same house where I was born into this world, sits precisely at the start of the road that descends from the parish church, just as you enter the small cluster of houses that make up Regueiro.