Federico García Lorca (1898-1936) was born in Fuente Vaqueros, Granada. The son of a liberal landowner, he studied at the Universities of Granada and Madrid. He published his first book of poems in 1921. His most famous plays are the three 'folk tragedies' Blood Wedding (1935), Yerma (1937) and The House of Bernarda Alba (1940). He also wrote puppet plays and popular farces. Poetic works include Gypsy Ballads (1928) and Lament for the Death of a Bullfighter and Other Poems (1935) - both profoundly Andalusian in mood and imagery - and the surrealist Poet in New York (1940). A left-wing intellectual, Lorca was forced into exile during the Spanish Civil War and murdered near Alfacar by Franco’s Nationalists in 1936.