Gamel Woolsey
Author of Malaga Burning
Gamel Woolsey, then in her late thirties, was living in a small village outside the southern coastal city of Malaga when the Spanish Civil War broke out in July 1936. She had arrived in Spain four years earlier with her English husband Gerald Brenan.
Gamel Woolsey and Gerald Brenan considered themselves poets first and novelists second. Her memoir of the war was originally published in Britain in 1939 as Death’s Other Kingdom. Pythia Press published it in the United States as Malaga Burning: An American Woman’s Eyewitness Account of the Spanish Civil War.
Her hometown was Aiken, South Carolina, and she was to be inducted into the South Carolina Academy of Authors in 2011. Zalin Grant tells how he came to publish her memoir in Gamel Woolsey: Eyewitness to the Spanish Civil War (also in French).
“What distinguishes Woolsey’s account is her profound empathy for others, as well as her keen poet’s eye…”
Book World, The Washington Post
