Born January 6: Juan Goytisolo

Praised by Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Edmund White, and according to the Guardian, "widely acknowledged as Spain's greatest living writer," Juan Goytisolo has lived in self-imposed exile in Marrakech since the 1960s. (He is 82 today and now spends part of each year in Paris.) His more than 30 books make clear why he left his native land: Franco, the post-Franco government, the Catholic church, middle class bourgeois attitudes, and homophobia. Also, he loves Arabs, particularly illiterate or uneducated men whose gayness is not marked by effeminate behavior but a hyper virility. Depending on which critics you ask, his masterpiece is either his two-volume memoir, groundbreaking for among other things its frankness about gay sex, or his trilogy Marks of Identity, Count Julian, and Juan the Landless. Goytisolo's 2005 novel, A Cock-Eyed Comedy, recounts in his typically subversive style the ribald sexual antics of a gay priest. His most recent book is Exiled from Almost Everywhere [Kindle]. Last year he was awarded the $65,000 Prix Formentor.