The poet Joaquín Benito de Lucas was born in Talavera de la Reina in 1934. He studied Philosophy and Literature at the University of Madrid and obtained his doctorate from the same university in 1964. He lived and worked for almost ten years in various Arab countries, mainly in Syria, and later in Germany, where he taught at the Free University of Berlin. In 1967 he returned to Spain and since then he has been teaching, first in high schools and later at the Autonomous University of Madrid, in the UNED and in teacher training schools in Alicante, Cuenca and Madrid. His first book of poems, Las tentaciones (1964) was followed by several other volumes of poetry including Materia de Olvido (Adonais Prize, 1967), Memorial del viento (Premio Miguel Hernández, 1976), La sombra ante el espejo (Premio Castilla la Mancha, 1987) and, more recently, the anthology Al fuego de la vida (1995) and Invitación al viaje (Rabindranath Tagore Award, 1995). He also received the Award for Poetry Tiflos for his volume Álbum de familia.
