SUCCESS came early to Carmen Laforet when she won a major literary prize at the age of 23 with her first novel, Nada — the Spanish word for nothing.

Laforet, born in 1921 in Barcelona, did what more experienced writers were unable to achieve: she broke the terrible silence which had descended upon Spain in the wake of the bloody civil war, capturing the devastation and uncertainty of those painful years.

In the 1940s many artists and writers had fled into exile while those who decided to stay under Franco’s military regime often chose silence as the safest option. But as a literary debutante and growing up in the turmoil of the period Laforet had no yardstick with which to measure the challenge of her semi-biographical tale to the censorship demands of the dictatorship.

Nada tells the story of Andrea, a young woman who goes to live in Barcelona in her gloomy grandmother’s house with her aunt Angustias, her uncles Juan and Román, Juan’s wife, Gloria, their son, and the maid, Antonia.

When it won, in January 1945, the first Nadal Prize (an award established to honour the memory of Eugenio Nadal, the young, recently deceased editor of Destino Publishing), Laforet was transformed into a bestselling author overnight. Nada was hailed as the best Spanish novel of its time and critics compared Laforet to Dostoevsky and Pio Baroja.

The novel is still going strong as the third most translated Spanish novel after Miguel Cervantes’ Don Quixote and The Family of Pascual Duarte by Camilo José Cela. But the success of Nada seemed to freeze the fledgeling novelist, fleeing from the fame it brought her. To Laforet, the book was full of flaws and an immature first effort.

Laforet’s early years were spent in Las Palmas on the island of Gran Canaria, where her father practised as an architect. Her mother died when Laforet was 12 and, disliking her father’s new wife, she returned to the city of her birth to study philosophy and literature. She later studied law in Madrid, but soon devoted her time to her own writing. The reception which awaited her first novel must have frightened her. Spanish writers in exile greeted it with enthusiasm.

She married Manuel Cerezales, a critic and editor who was older than she and with whom she had five children. Her daughter Cristina is today an acclaimed artist.

Leforet wrote occasionally for the magazine Destino and at the start of the 1950s published a novella, The Island and the Demons, and two collections of short stories. She underwent a profoundly mystical religious experience which changed her course from agnostic to militant Christian, which she described in her next novel, The New Woman.

The St Paul-like conversion could not have been made clearer in the character of the novel’s main protagonist Paulina, who experiences a vision while travelling by train, suddenly knowing “that Love is God”, and “an immense bonfire of happiness and wellbeing”.

This reborn writer, who was far more in tune with the rampant Catholicism of the dictatorship, won the National Literature Prize. But either her inspiration dried up or she no longer felt the urge to write.

It would not be until 1963 that her next novel, Sunstroke, appeared. It was to be the first in a trilogy, Three Steps Out of Time, but she never completed it. The second part, Turning the Corner, was pulled from publication by Laforet herself when it was at the final proof stage.

Out of a lecture tour of the United States emerged a travelogue called Parallel 35, but the greater part of her output at this time was her correspondence with the exiled writer Ramón J. Sender, the author of Requiem for a Spanish Peasant.

Laforet travelled widely to Poland, France and Italy where she lived for several years in the Trastevere district of Rome after separating from her husband in 1970. Although she continued to publish newspaper articles, she kept herself isolated from literary society.

She finally returned to Spain in 1979 and lived for a few years in Santander before finally settling in a Madrid suburb, where she continued to guard her privacy even as the prestige of her first novel continued to grow.

Carmen Laforet, author, was born on September 6, 1921. She died on February 28, 2004, aged 82.