Writer from Navarre, born in Pamplona in 1965.
In his youth he went to Mexico, where he stayed from 1981 to 1983. There he began his studies in Communication at the Universidad Iberoamericana, which he completed at the University of Navarre in 1989. From there he moved to Madrid, where he worked for some time as a crime reporter for the newspaper "El Mundo". He combined this work with studies in Philology and Aesthetics of the Arts, disciplines in which he graduated from the Autonomous and Complutense Universities of Madrid.
He contributed opinion articles to "Diario de Navarra", to the cultural section of "Heraldo de Aragón" and "Radio Pamplona-Cadena Ser", to "El Mundo", to the "Culturas" supplement of "Diario 16" and to the literary magazines "Río Arga" (on whose editorial board he served for several years), "Elgacena", and the national magazines "Ínsula" and "Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos". In 1991 he left journalism and began his doctorate in the Department of Spanish Language and Literature at the Faculty of Information Sciences of the Complutense University of Madrid. He obtained his doctorate in 1993, with a thesis on "El artículo diario de Francisco Umbral (1957-1990). Analysis and documentation". He was an assistant lecturer for three years, and subsequently a lecturer in Contemporary Spanish Literature and Documentation in the Humanities at the University School of Library and Information Science, tasks which he shares with literature.
He has received grants for literary creation, both from the Government of Navarre (1985) and from the Ministry of Culture, the latter in 1993 for his book of short stories Manchas en la pupila, a work that was a finalist in the 1992 Jaén Prize for Narrative. That same year he was awarded the "Francisco Ynduráin" prize for young writers. In 1994 he was a finalist in the "Tomás Fermín de Arteta" International Fiction Contest in Aoiz and won the "Premio de las Letras de Navarra" for authors under 35 years of age. In 1997 he was a finalist in the NH Hoteles short story competition and in the "San Fermín" International Journalism Prize; and in 1998 he received the Government of Navarre's Prize for Literary Creation in the Narrative category.
He participated in the collective book Premio Jaén de relatos: año 1992 (Jaén, Concejalía de Cultura y Turismo, Servicio de Publicaciones, 1994), which includes the work Manchas en la pupila comprising 42 stories. His literary work also includes two titles published in 1994: a collection of poems entitled Como si al otro lado latiera (Madrid, Endymion, 1994) and the book of short stories Noticias de la frontera (Madrid, Libertarias/Prodhufi, 1994). "The former brings together a conceptual poetry, with mystical references; the latter is a compendium of micro-stories made up of a few lines, in which the suggestion close to poetry and the fantastic element are its essential components". (Martín Nogales 1994). To write the collection of poems, the author made use of a grant from the Government of Navarre awarded in 1989. The theme of love dominates the first part, treated with "an air of rites and liturgies" - Mata says - "in which the influence of oriental poetry is perceptible". At times, the poems are condensed into just two or three suggestive verses of great expressive intensity and lexical richness (Mata, 1999). For his part, Jaime Siles warns in his prologue: "Gracia's poetry does not arise from a series of readings, but from the verbal fixation of images". The book covers poems written in very different periods and, for this reason, it is a good reflection of the author's trajectory. The first part is magical and playful, and maintains an innocent look at the world. In the second, the poetry becomes more hermetic, full of references to mythology and reflections on chance and personal destiny. The third and last is more serious, austere and reflective.
On the other hand, News from the Border includes a collection of 71 short stories of marked lyricism, some of which are micro-stories of only 2 or 3 lines. Hence, in the title, the word "News", like little flashes or images, and the complement "of the border", alluding to that frontier territory of the human mind where the most confused thoughts, the misty and the incoherent of the human being dwell. The stories always have a surprise at the end and often create spaces of fantasy in which the unknown invades reality, in the manner of Borges, Onetti, García Márquez or Bioy Casares. They are often incomplete stories that the reader must recreate and complete (Mata, 1999).
In 1999, Gracia published a new book of short stories entitled Queridos desconocidos (Pamplona, Government of Navarre, Department of Education and Culture, 1999), with which he had won the Prize for Literary Creation awarded by the Government of Navarre the previous year. It is made up of twelve stories that deal with different themes and treatments ranging from intimacy to realistic testimony or reflection. The book has a more narrative and less lyrical tone, and the narration also abandons the fantastic to embrace the everyday, although always from an incomplete or blurred vision of the events that are told. It includes 12 independent stories whose common denominator is open suggestion; the same tension, in all of them, what is known and what is unknown.
In 2001 he published a study entitled El artículo diario de Francisco Umbral (1957-1988): análisis y documentación [Electronic resource] (Madrid, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 2001), the result of his doctoral thesis, and 2003 saw the publication of his first novel, Cazadores (Aoiz (Navarre), Bilaketa, 2002). It evokes the adventures of an eleven-year-old boy, and delves into the difficult and decisive transition from childhood to adolescence. "Perhaps it includes a turbulent novelty, in the way that certain tribes require the initiate to hunt a wild beast in order to leave the realm of childhood". -said Gracia in his introduction to the work. And he added: "I chose to mould the narrative point of view to the gaze of an eleven-year-old boy, so that time and space were present and absolute references; this in turn demanded a language suited to the sensibility and perspective of that narrator: tension, lyricism, immediacy. Writing Cazadores was a joyful challenge. I also recovered the enigmatic pleasure of reading folk tales, because the roots of this story seek, in their own way, the suggestion of myth".
Part of his poetic work, as well as some of his stories, have been collected in anthologies and collective works such as Antología poética vasca (Madrid, Ediciones VOSA, 1987); Poesía Vasca Contemporánea (Málaga, Litoral, 1995); Quince Líneas. Relatos hiperbreves (Barcelona, Tusquets, 1996); Antología Bilaketa de Narrativa, (Aoiz, Grupo de Cultura Bilaketa, 1996) and Antología Bilaketa de Poesía (Aoiz, Grupo de Cultura Bilaketa, 1997).
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