Despite being one of the best-known newspaper columnists in his home country, Fernando Aramburu never wanted to be one at all. His love-hate relationship with newspapers has been one of the most curious sagas of the Spanish opinion pages. In November, he abruptly left Spain’s largest newspaper El País, having written a weekly column every Tuesday for two and a half years. The reason: he had “lost faith” in the column and its purpose. “I have the suspicion,” he said, “that, little by little, I have become out of place in my own era, that I have stopped understanding it, and that my opinions, more and more, resemble an open umbrella in the middle of a hurricane.”

This farewell marked the end of Aramburu’s second stint as a columnist. His first had occurred a few years earlier for another one of Spain’s major dailies, El Mundo. Following the enormous success of his 2016 novel Patria—which won more than a d millions in saleozen major literary prizes, sold over 1.2 million copies, was translated into 34 languages, and was adapted into an HBO series—the paper offered him a weekly column on its back-page, one of the most sought-after plots in the Spanish media landscape. He called the new column “Entre coche y andén”, “Mind the Gap”. Every Sunday, Aramburu would write on all matters of current affairs, from social media mobs and cell phone addiction to the divide in Argentina between Peronists and anti-Peronists or the memory of the first victim of Basque separatist group ETA. The range of topics he covered was impressive. But the column only ran for nineteen months. From that perspective, Aramburu’s more recent tenure at El País can be seen as a slight improvement.

The Newspaper Novelist

Marked by short stamina and dramatic departures, Aramburu’s love-hate relationship with newspapers has still profoundly shaped his literary writing. During and after his university years, according to his longtime friend, the writer Álvaro Bermejo, “Fernando didn’t read newspapers”, and “terrorism remained far from his literature.” In the 1990s, something changed. After a meeting with Félix Maraña, a fellow Basque writer, he walked out of Maraña’s office with around “eight to ten” yearbooks from the newspapers El País, Egin (the alleged mouthpiece of ETA), and Diario 16 to use them as background documentation for his early novels such as Fuegos con limón.

Though those early novels didn’t comment explicitly on the political situation in the Basque Country, his more recent work leaves no doubt as to how much Aramburu’s fiction owes to newspapers. For more than a decade now, he has garnished his novels with true stories and faits divers, organizations that actually exist, and historical figures. The humanitarian group Anai Artea appears in Años lentos from 2012, while the kidnapping and killing of Miguel Zabalza by the Spanish Civil Guard is a plot point in Patria, to name just two of many examples.

While using news articles as sources for his novels has become second nature for Aramburu, writing them has not. Like many of his literary peers in Spain, such as the late Javier Marías, he published his first opinion pieces on the heels of novelistic success. His first article, and perhaps his most memorable, titled “Why Do We Kill?”, used satire to dismantle the rationale behind ETA violence. But unlike some of his peers, he did not immediately become a regular opinion-maker. During his first two decades as an author, Aramburu’s op-eds remained few and far between.