Qué estoy haciendo aquí

Over four decades, Benjamín Prado has forged a multifaceted and inexhaustible literary career. Proof of this lies in the sections that comprise these memoirs: "The Poet," "The Novelist," "The Journalist," "The Lyricist," and "The Playwright," to which we could add his work as an essayist and, more recently, as an actor. A passion for language in all its dimensions permeates this book, which is also populated by some of the greatest names the author has encountered throughout his life, many of whom he was fortunate enough to call friends: Almudena Grandes, Juan Marsé, Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, Rafael Alberti, Octavio Paz, Ana María Matute, Jaime Gil de Biedma, and Mario Vargas Llosa, not to mention Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Paul Auster, and Patti Smith, with whom he has had more fleeting but no less revealing encounters. From the early call of his vocation, through a first and unexpected encounter with Rafael Alberti in a bar, an episode that marked his life in a thousand ways, to the days that turned into nights writing songs with his inseparable Joaquín Sabina, Benjamín Prado has always asked himself the question that he now tries to answer, a sign of wonder at the privilege of such a full life: "What am I doing here?"