Diego Medrano

Diego Medrano Fernández (Oviedo, Spain, 1978) is a Spanish poet, narrator and regular columnist of Asturian newspaper El Comercio.

Begins philosophy studies in the Universidad de Oviedo, where, "after feeling like Oscar Wilde in prison", and telling himself a certain quote by Francois Mauriac -"Freedom and health are the same thing"- he soon leaves everything for the sake of his cyclopean literary vocation. "Perpetual writer, always writer", he is the heir of a tradition that combines decadence and culture in the same identity: Jean Lorrain, Charles Baudelaire, Max Jacob, Arthur Rimbaud, Emile Cioran, Louis Aragon, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Georges Bataille among others.

He steps into the world of literature with the book: Los héroes inutiles (The Useless Heroes) (Ellago Ediciones, 2005), a complete collection of the correspondence that he held with Spanish "damned" writer Leopoldo María Panero, that serves as a literary poetic where the author, following two well-known sentences by Charles Baudelaire, declares himself "hero" and "useless". His first poetry book, also published in 2005: El hombre entre las rocas (The Man Among the Rocks) (Arena Libros) is a sort of writing notebook in which he entwines the poetic with the narrative in a same coherent unity, similar to Jean Cocteau or René Char, where the former (poetic) is always destined to triumph over the latter (narrative).

He publishes his first novel El clítoris de Camille (Camille's Clitoris) (Seix Barral) in early 2006, a transgressive novel that is practically impossible to label or classify. This novel was surrounded in controversy for constituting the solid monologue of a decadent mentally ill writer facing a love process, a surprising novel, tinged by the use of a most peculiar and deconstructive syntax and a not less provoking language. Also in 2006, he published a book of micro-stories, Los sueños diurnos. Manual para amantes, pobres y asesinos (Daylight Dreams. Instructions for lovers, beggars and murderers) (Cahoba Narrativa) which is the sum of over 300 micro-stories and over 600 characters, filled with quotes and "illuminations", where he followed the composition processes of Robert Walser and his Mikrogramme (Micrograms).

In 2007, with La soledad no tiene edad (Loneliness Has No Age) (Septem), Diego Medrano combines extensive and short stories, the titles of which should give an accurate orientation: Bragas (Panties), Nembutal, Urinarios (Urinals), Mahou, Atapuerca, Sirenas (Sirens)... 272 pages for readers ready for everything. In 2008, Medrano returns with the poetry book Agua me falta (Got No Water) (Septem).

The first volume of his diaries, Diario del artista echado a perder (Diary Of The Wasted Artist), constitutes a convulse "Dictionary of the lousy" -dozens and dozens of "damned" and "cursed" artists- with the author's own life, no less heterodox or singular.

He also published other poetry books such as: El viento muerde (The Wind Bites) and A veces cuerdo (Sometimes Sane).

Between Oficio de tinieblas 5 (Trade of Darkness 5) by Camilo José Cela –for searching a new and unruly order in literature- and the Petites Poemes en Prose (Little Poems in Prose) by Charles Baudelaire –for their poetic nature concentrated in the minimal narrative structure- comes Medrano's "El hombre entre las rocas". Between Oppium (Opium: Diary of a Cure) by Jean Cocteau –for its attempt at a constant diary of all work- and James Joyce's Finnegans Wake –in its plausible attempt to fixate an episodic syntax, through formulas that the author plays with and is not going to give up- appears this little jewel. With the freedom of Samuel Beckett –letting the verbal river flow- and the aphasia of Louis-Ferdinand Celine –unworried about the style that his own work germinates- Medrano elaborates this little verbal artifact, without comparison in our days, the modernity of which is that of the very tradition that is assimilated – the quoted authors and many others- trying its maximum use as conscience lash and sublime purge of styles.