Federico García Lorca: poet, playwright and symbol of injustice

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Lorca has inspired other writers and musicians and Leonard Cohen even named his daughter after the Granada-born legend

Jennie Rhodes

Friday, 27 March 2026, 12:18

From France to the USA, a room in a hotel in Buenos Aires and a bronze plaque on the Rainbow Honor Walk in the Castro district of San Francisco: they all pay tribute to Federico García Lorca, the celebrated poet and playwright from Granada.

Lorca's poetry and plays have influenced musicians, artists and fellow poets around the world. In fact, Leonard Cohen even named his daughter Lorca after the Granada-born writer. His work has inspired poets including Allen Ginsberg and Ted Hughes, who famously translated Lorca's Bodas de Sangre (Blood Wedding) in 1996.

Lorca travelled extensively in his short life and in 1929 he set off on an international voyage to New York, via Paris and London with the Spanish politician Fernando de los Rios. The pair sailed to the USA from Southampton.

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Once in New York, Lorca took a room in Furnald Hall at Columbia University and enrolled for an English-language course, where he mixed with Philip Cummings, Campbell Hackforth-Jones and Mildred Adams, whom he already knew from Granada.

While in New York, Lorca wrote El Rey de Harlem (The King of Harlem) and 1910, Intermedio, two of the first poems written for what was to become Poet in New York.

The journal Alhambra, edited by Ángel Flores in New York, published two ballads translated into English as well as a number of Lorca's photographs.

In the 1930s Lorca also travelled to the Caribbean and South America and in particular Cuba, Argentina and Chile, where he became friends with the acclaimed Chilean poet Pablo Neruda.

For many, including Ginsberg, who was a champion of human and civil rights, Lorca is not just renowned for his literary work, but is also an international symbol of artistic repression and political injustice because of his death at the hands of Spanish fascist forces on 19 August 1936 in Vízcar, Granada province, at the age of just 38.