Garcia Lorca, Federico

1898 – He was born on the 5th day of June this year into a family of minor, but wealthy, landowners in the small village of Fuente Vaqueros, Granada, García Lorca was a precocious child, although he did not excel at school.

1909 – His father moved the family to the city of Granada, Andalusia where in time he became deeply involved in local artistic circles.

1918 - His first collection of prose pieces, Impresiones y paisajes, was published in this year to local acclaim but little commercial success.

1919 - Associations made at Granada's Arts Club were to stand him in good stead when he moved in this year to the famous Residencia de estudiantes in Madrid. Here he met Gregorio Martínez Sierra, the Director of Madrid's Teatro Eslava, at whose invitation he wrote and staged his first play, El maleficio de la mariposa, also in this year.

1926 - Lorca wrote the play 'The Shoemaker's Prodigious Wife', which was a farce based on the relationship between a flirtatious, petulant wife and a henpecked shoemaker.

1927 - He published three further collections of poems including Canciones (Songs) and Romancero Gitano (1928, translated as 'Gypsy Ballads', 1953), his best-known book of poetry. His second play Mariana Pineda, with stage settings by Dalí, opened to great acclaim in Barcelona in this year.

1930 – He returned to Spain this year, coincided with the fall of the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera and the re-establishment of the Spanish Republic.

1931 – He was appointed as director of Teatro Universitario la Barraca ("The Shack"). This was funded by the Second Republic's Ministry of Education, and it was charged with touring Spain's remotest rural areas in order to introduce audiences to radically modern interpretations of classic Spanish theatre.

1933 - He distilled his theories on artistic creation and performance in a famous lecture entitled "Play and Theory of the Duende", first given in Buenos Aires and Havana in this year, in which he argued that great art depends upon a vivid awareness of death, connection with a nation's soil, and an acknowledgment of the limitations of reason. La Barraca was the first to produce Lorca's 'rural trilogy' plays

1934 - The group's subsidy was cut in half by the new government this year, and la Barraca's last performance was in April of 1936.

1936 - When war broke out in this year, García Lorca left Madrid for Granada, even though he was aware that he was almost certainly heading toward his death in a city reputed to have the most conservative oligarchy in Andalucía. García Lorca and his brother-in-law, who was also the socialist mayor of Granada, were soon arrested.He was executed, shot by Falange militia on August 19, 1936.