Julia Uceda

Julia Uceda Valiente (22 October 1925 – 21 July 2024) was a Spanish academic and poet. She won the 2003 National Poetry Award for the book En el viento, hacia el mar and the Gold Medal of Merit in the Fine Arts.

Biography Uceda graduated in Philosophy and Letters from the University of Seville, where she also obtained a doctorate, with a thesis on poet José Luis Hidalgo.

In 1959, Uceda published her first book Mariposa en cenizas in the magazine Alcaraván de Arcos de la Frontera. Her participation in the Sevillian poetry circles is widely attested. She directed the magazine Rocío together with Manuel Mantero and Ángel Benito.

In 1961, Uceda won the second prize for the Premio Adonáis de Poesía with the collection of poems Extraña Juventud. close to the social aesthetics prevailing in those years. However, from her third collection of poems, Sin mucha esperanza (1966), she began a new aesthetic direction marked by the incorporation of Greco-Latin thought. These three collections of poems constitute the author's first stage.

After receiving an offer from Michigan State University, Uceda went to the United States. There she wrote Poemas de Cherry Lane (1968), which marked the beginning of a second stage influenced by analytical psychology. It was followed by Campanas en Sansueña, En elogio de la locura and Viejas voces secretas de la noche. In them, the reconciliation of the poetic subject with the Francoist past prevails.

She settled in Galicia in 1976 and there she wrote her last four poetry collections, Del camino de humo, Zona desconocida, Hablando con un haya and Escritos en la cabra de los árbol. Her poems lead readers to reflect on the origin and to search in the present for the heritage of the remote past.

Uceda lived in the Ferrol neighborhood of Serantes for five decades. She died there on 21 July 2024, at the age of 98.