Dolores Medio

Born 1920, in Oviedo, Spain. Spanish writer.

Medio was a schoolteacher, but after publishing her novella Nina in 1945 she devoted herself to literature. In her autobiographical novel We Are the Riveros (1953), Medio depicted the decline of a bourgeois family, giving a true picture of the uprising of the Asturian miners in 1934. The heroine of the novel A Schoolteacher’s Diary (1961) is a peasant republican school-teacher. The principal characters of Medio’s novels A State Civil Servant (1956; Russian translation, 1960), The Fish Swims as Before (1959), Bibiana (1963; Russian translation, 1968), and Señor Garcia (1966) are petty clerks and Madrid workers, who gradually awaken from their social passivity.

Realistic in their nature, Medio’s books are permeated with a humanistic faith in the dignity of the common people. Medio is also the author of books for children, for example, the collection of short stories Andres (1967).