Matilde Camus

Aurora Matilde Gómez Camus, known as Matilde Camus, was a Spanish poet, researcher and columnist. Born in Santander in 1919 and dying in the same city in 2012, she wrote mainly in Spanish and rooted most of her work in Cantabria, the region she never really left, though she travelled widely. She matters because she joined poetry with careful local history, and she stands as one of the notable women writers of twentieth-century Cantabria.

She was born on 26 September 1919 into a family that had lost its mother early: Matilde Camus del Villar died at 21, about four weeks after giving birth prematurely. The household's housekeeper took over the upbringing of the little girl, while her father, Francisco Gómez Landeras, remained central to her life; family tradition says she wrote her first poem for him at nine. She studied at the Colegio de San José and the Instituto de Santa Clara. During the Civil War she met Justo Guisández, whom she married in 1943 in the parish church of Monte, and she began publishing in the local press. She signed with her mother's surname in her mother's memory.

Monte, the village of her paternal family, runs through much of her output. Her first book, Voces, appeared in 1969 with a preface by Gerardo Diego, her former teacher, and his encouragement pushed her towards writing full time. What followed was a large body of work: intimate, landscape-based poetry, children's verse, and local histories such as those of Monte and Cueto. These archival studies show a steady interest in documents and in recovering forgotten figures, from poets to soldiers of the nineteenth century.

She led the literature section of the Ateneo de Santander from 1969 to 1974 and was a member of the Centro de Estudios Montañeses from 1972 until her death. Her memory survives in Monte, where a place and an assembly hall bear her name, and in the Cantabrian libraries that keep her manuscripts and publications. For the centenary of her birth in 2020 a selection of her poetry was issued, and in 2022 a collection of her complete poetic work was presented.