Top 10 neglected books about the Spanish Civil War

Sarah Watling is the author of The Olivier Sisters, for which she was awarded the Tony Lothian Prize.

She holds degrees from the University of Cambridge and the University of London and was a 2020 Silvers Grant recipient.

Watling's new book is Tomorrow Perhaps the Future: Writers, Outsiders, and the Spanish Civil War.

At the Guardian she tagged ten neglected books about the Spanish Civil War, including:

Savage Coast and Mediterranean by Muriel Rukeyser

The 22-year-old American Rukeyser was in Spain for only a few days after the outbreak of war before being evacuated, yet Spain, she later wrote, was the place where “I began to say what I believed”. The results included the modernist novel Savage Coast and an epic poem, Mediterranean. Rukeyser was haunted by the memory of Otto Bloch, an exile from Nazi Germany who joined the Republic’s foreign volunteer force, the International Brigades, and was killed. In Mediterranean, Rukeyser tells of a man who “kept his life straight as a single issue”, which, for me, sums up the dedication (and reduced options) of such people.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue