Rivas, Manuel

Manuel Rivas is a Spanish novelist, poet, essayist, playwright and journalist born in La Coruña, Galicia in northwest Spain. His father was a mason who also played in a dance band; his mother was a milk seller who told her son to get himself a job where he did not have to get wet, so he went to university. The family moved to a rural, working class district on the outskirts of La Coruña when Rivas was five years old. That is where he went to school and spent most of his teenage years. He became an apprentice, working nights as a typesetter at the El Ideal Gallego newspaper, at the age of fifteen and he worked as a journalist while he later read information science in Madrid.