Portal Nicolás, Marta

b. 1930, Nava (Asturias)

   Writer

   Professional academic, journalist, essayist and novelist, Portal won the 1966 Planeta Prize with a pseudo-feminist novel of male philandering, A tientas y a ciegas (Blindly and Gropingly). Her collected novelettes comprise El malmuerto (Murdered). Study in Latin America resulted in scholarly essays on corn and on novels of the Mexican Revolution. A ras de las sombras (Level with the Shadows), fiction, preceeded another adultery novel, Ladridos a la luna (Howling at the Moon), again showing the woman trapped in a failed marriage. Later titles include La veintena (Twenty Stories) and El buen camino (The Good Road).

   Further reading

   - García Viñó, M. (1984) "Marta Portal: De la estética al conocimiento", Arbor 117: 127–31 (concerns her 1984 novel, Pago de traición— Payment for Treachery).

   - Pérez, J. (1988) Contemporary Women Writers of Spain, Boston, MA: G.K.Hall, pp. 164–5 (brief panorama of life and works).

   JANET PÉREZ