Best known in modern times as a poet and playwright but also an accomplished painter, pianist and composer, Federico García Lorca is remembered as an emblematic figure of pre-Franquist Spain.

Born on 5 June 1898 into a family of minor landowners in the village of Fuente Vaqueros in Andalucía, García Lorca was a precocious child but did not excel at school. In 1909 he moved with his family to the nearby city of Granada, where in time he became deeply involved in local artistic circles. His first collection of poems, Impresiones y paisajes ('Impressions and Landscapes'), was published in 1918 to local acclaim but little commmercial success.

Moving in 1919 to the University of Madrid, he secured a place at the famous Residencia de estudiantes and began his artistic career in earnest, helped in no small part by associations made at Granada's Arts Club. At university he would befriend his future collaborators Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, amonst many others who were or would become influential artists in Spain.

It was also at the Residencia that he met Gregorio Martínez Sierra, avant-gardist Director of Madrid's Teatro Eslava, at whose invitation he wrote and staged his first play, El maleficio de la mariposa ('The Butterfly's Evil Spell'), in 1919-20. A verse play dramatising the impossible love between a cockroach and a butterfly, with a supporting cast of other insects, it was laughed off stage by an unappreciative public after only four performances and soured Lorca's attitude to the theatre-going public for the rest of his career: he would later claim that 1927's Mariana Pineda was his first play.

Over the next few years Lorca became increasingly involved in his art and Spain's avant-garde. He published three further collections of poems including the Romancero gitano ('Gypsy Ballads', 1928), his best-known book of poetry, and his second play Mariana Pineda opened to great acclaim in 1927.

However, towards the end of the 1920s Lorca fell victim to increasing depression, a situation not helped by his anguish over the increasingly unsuccessful concealment of his homosexuality from friends and family. In this he was deeply affected by the success of the Romancero gitano and other works, which increased, through the fame they brought him, the painful contrast between the persona of the successful author that he was forced to maintain in public and the tortured self he could only acknowledge in private.

Growing estrangement between Lorca and his closest friends reached its climax when the two Surrealists Dalí and Buñuel collaborated on the film Un chien andalou ('An Andalusian Dog', 1929) which Lorca interpreted, perhaps erroneously, as an attack on him. At the same time, his intensely passionate but fatally one-sided affair with the sculptor Emilio Aladrén was collapsing as the latter became involved with his future wife.

Aware of these problems, if not perhaps of their causes, Lorca's family arranged for him to take a lengthy tour of the United States in 1929-30. His stay in America, particularly New York, was his first adult experience of a democratic society -- albeit one dominated by rampant commercialism and the casual social oppresion of minority groups -- and acted as a powerful catalyst for some of his most daring work. His collection of poems, Poeta en Nueva Yark, explores his alienation and isolation through some graphically experimental poetic techniques, and the two plays Así que pasen cinco años and El público were far ahead of their time.

Lorca's return to Spain in 1930 was greeted by the fall of the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera and the reestablishment of the Spanish Republic. In 1931, Lorca was appointed Director of the government-sponsored student theatre company, La Barraca, whose remit was to tour Spain introducing audiences to 'classic' Spanish theatre. While touring Lorca wrote his best-known plays, the 'rural trilogy' of Bodas de sangre, Yerma and La casa de Bernarda Alba.

As a prominent intellectual and Republican, Lorca became a marked man on the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. He was assassinated by anti-Republican rebels on 19 August 1936 and thrown into an unmarked grave in Viznar, near Granada. The Franco regime placed a general ban on his work, which was not rescinded until 1953 when a heavily censored Complete Works was released. Even then it was only after Franco's death in 1975 that Lorca's life and death could be openly discussed in Spain. His body has never been recovered.

Adapted from Nicholas Boalch, The Experimental Theatre of Federico García Lorca: El público, Comedia sin título and Así que pasen cinco años as Revolutions in Theatre (Unpublished dissertation: University of Durham, 2003)