Biography
Lito Vila Baleato was born in Germany and, having grown up in Santiago de Compostela and studied German and Hispanic Philology at the university there, he is now a secondary school teacher in Germany, where he has published numerous textbooks on learning Spanish as a foreign language. From his position as an “emigrant”, he contributes a blog, La generación de la burbuja (The Bubble Generation), to the Galician newspaper El Correo Gallego. Campus Morte, published in 2018, is his first novel in the Galician language and won the prestigious Sarmiento Award, an award that is voted on by three thousand schoolchildren in Galicia. He has also co-authored a history of his hometown’s football club, SD Compostela 1962-2022: Sixty Years of Blue and White Feeling.
Synopsis
Campus Morte (184 pages) is Lito Vila Baleato’s first novel and received the Sarmiento Award, an award that is voted on by Galician schoolchildren.
Sample
While the professor Iago Miranda was going over what his students would need to do before their next class and asking them to read a short text, the sound of chairs scraping the ground as their occupants stood up betrayed the fact that the students who were most in a rush were already on their way out of classroom FO23 in the Faculty of Foreign Languages at the University of Hanover.
As the last students left the room and while he turned the projector and computer off, Iago was still giving a quick answer to a student who had approached him at the last minute. Once he’d picked up the last of his things from his desk, he turned his phone on and was surprised to see he had four missed calls and a flood of Whatsapps. Still in the classroom, he checked and saw that his friend Martín had tried to get hold of him on several occasions. He clicked on the green icon for Whatsapp and amidst other chats, found his friend’s name, who had indeed written to him three times in little over an hour.
Portico of Galician Literature 