Federico del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús García Lorca was born on 5 June 1898, in Fuente Vaqueros, a small town seventeen kilometres west of Granada in southern Spain. His father was a prosperous landowner whose fortunes rose with the sugar industry; his mother was a schoolteacher. The family moved first to nearby Valderrubio and then, in 1909, to Granada itself, where García Lorca would spend formative years at the summer villa called the Huerta de San Vicente. All three family homes are today museums. He came to literature sideways — through music. From the age of eleven he studied piano under Antonio Segura Mesa at the local conservatory, and it was Segura's death in 1916 that pushed him toward writing. His earliest prose pieces — "Nocturne," "Ballade," "Sonata" — took their titles directly from musical forms, and the rhythmic sensibility never left him. His first book, *Impresiones y paisajes* (1918), was printed at his father's expense after a university tour of Castile, León, and Galicia.
In 1919, persuaded by the educator Fernando de los Ríos, García Lorca moved to the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, the most intellectually alive address in Spain at the time. There he fell into close friendship with Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, came under the wing of the poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, and began his turbulent, decades-long negotiation between public acclaim and private suffering. His verse play *The Butterfly's Evil Spell* (1919–20) was laughed off the stage after four performances — an experience that shaped his ambivalence toward audiences for the rest of his career. His first formal poetry collection, *Libro de poemas*, appeared in 1921. Through the early 1920s he collaborated with composer Manuel de Falla to promote the Concurso de Cante Jondo, a festival championing flamenco's deep-song tradition, and began work on *Poema del cante jondo* (not published until 1931).
“García Lorca's reputation crystallised with *Romancero gitano* (*Gypsy Ballads*, 1928), which brought him fame across Spain and the Hispanic world almost overnight.”
He described the book as a "carved altar piece" of Andalusia, insisting it expressed not the visible region but the "hidden Andalusia" trembling beneath. The success pleased and trapped him: he resented being labelled a gypsy poet and felt pigeon-holed as a picturesque folklorist when his ambitions were far wider. The same year saw the collapse of his passionate attachment to Dalí and the end of his relationship with sculptor Emilio Aladrén Perojo, both losses feeding a deepening depression. In 1929 he sailed to New York on the RMS Olympic, enrolled at Columbia University's School of General Studies, and witnessed the Wall Street crash. The poems written in this period became *Poeta en Nueva York* (*Poet in New York*), published posthumously in 1940 (some editions cite 1942), and represent a sharp departure — surrealist, graphically experimental, and openly furious at urban capitalist modernity.
Back in Spain from 1930 onward, García Lorca channelled his energy into theatre with new urgency. He was appointed director of Teatro Universitario La Barraca, a state-funded travelling company charged with bringing classical Spanish drama to rural audiences who had never seen any, with a portable stage and almost no equipment. He also wrote the three plays on which his theatrical reputation rests: *Blood Wedding* (1932), *Yerma* (1934), and *The House of Bernarda Alba* (1936), a trilogy of tragedies centred on women, desire, and the suffocating codes of honour in Andalusian society. He was arrested by Nationalist forces at the start of the Spanish Civil War and assassinated on 19 August 1936. His remains have never been found. The precise motive is still disputed; theories range from his homosexuality and socialist sympathies to a personal vendetta. He was thirty-eight years old.