"The first time they put me in the darkroom, I had a great time. There, as in the forest, you could dream and let your imagination fly," Ana María Matute used to say when asked about her first contact with literature. Contrary to what happened with the rest of the children, the writer found in the punishment room the magic of words and the art of storytelling "La Matute", as she liked to be called, found in the darkness a door to the forest entrance .

She was ten years old when the Spanish Civil War broke out and her sweet and innocent "glass bell was shattered". She was still breathing the smell of childhood when from one day to the next she became a victim of a cruel war. She quickly learned the terrible differences that stood between her and her siblings, and the other children. They lived among cotton wool while "the others had nothing, no Kings, no birthday parties, no clothes, no food". The war, facing death, hunger and hatred forced her to grow up before her time. It was during those years of extreme hardship that she became a writer. The writer found in the word a means of relief, communication and escape forward.

Ana María Matute had to face very hard times throughout her life, but she never stopped writing because she assured that it was the only thing she knew how to do and that it had saved her from death. As a daughter of war, she cultivated a writing through which she denounced the sad reality that her country was suffering. Her novels are imprinted with the pessimism of those who suffer the pain of the present moment and the longing for the past. The melancholy that envelops each of her works is born of the ghosts that have always accompanied her because "each writer is a world and brings that world to her pages". Matute transferred her fears and obsessions to each of her novels and wrapped them in the blanket of a child's fantasy. Thus, his testimonies about the war reflect the innocent sensibility of the child, offering the reader a reality in which the imagination and dreams of each one have a place.

Like Alice in Wonderland, Ana María Matute has always been on the other side of the mirror, where words live in extraordinary worlds and where the turning of paper pages implies the revelation of a new life full of adventures. Since she discovered the dark room of the forest at the age of five, she found the light that would always guide her: "I had never experienced, nor would I ever experience again in all my life, a reality that was closer, more alive and that revealed to me the existence of other realities so alive and so close as the one that the forest revealed to me, the real one and the one created by words", she confessed in her emotional speech of entrance to the Real Academia Española (Royal Spanish Academy). She is probably still sitting in one of those corners of the forest inventing fascinating lives.