‘Difficult love’: Spanish publisher reprints groundbreaking book of Lorca’s homoerotic sonnets

A year after that clandestine publication in 2023, the poet’s family consented to the publication of all the sonnets Photograph: Alvarellos.

In the autumn of 1983, dozens of carefully chosen readers received an envelope containing a slim, red booklet of sonnets that had been locked away since they were written almost 50 years earlier by the most famous Spanish poet of the 20th century.

While those behind the initiative gave no clue as to their identities, their purpose was made abundantly clear in the dedication on the booklet’s final page: “This first edition of the Sonnets of Dark Love is being published to remember the passion of the man who wrote them.”