Lucía Etxebarría de Asteinza is a famous Spanish writer. She is well known for her biographical account of Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, known as La historia de Kurt y Courtney. Lucía was born in 1966 and is of Basque origin. Her hometown is Valencia and she is the youngest among her seven siblings. The Basque surname of Etxebarria has no diacritics and Etxebarría was merely a typo that she liked and chose to embrace. Her first novel was Amor curiosidad, prozac y dudas, which came out in 1997. In 1998 her second Novel received the Nadal prize. The second novel was named Beatriz y los cuerpos celestes.
Another achievement came for Lucía in the form of De todo lo visible y lo invisible in the year2001, which she received the Primavera Prize. Other achievements of Lucía include the Planeta Prize in 2004, which she got for Un milagro en equilibrio. Other than her books, she has also received the Barcarola Poetry Prize in 2004. Last year Lucía said that she would discontinue writing due to digital piracy that was making her work unworthy of the effort she was putting in. This seemed like quite a disheartened comment of a frustrated author who like many others has to face the grim realities of digital piracy.
Despite the accolades, Lucía career has not been all achievements. In fact, she has been accused of plagiarism a number of times. In 2001, a Spanish magazine, Interviú leveled plagrism accusation in an article, claiming that Lucía had copied content from Antonio Colina, for her own book. The book in question was Estación de infierno. Even her first novel, Amor came under fire with accusations of including literal sentences from the book Prozac Nation, which was written by the American writer Elizabeth Wurtzel. The accusations resulted in Lucía suing the magazine. However, the magazine was acquitted by the tribunal court. The judge went as far as to mention in the sentence that accusations by the magazine Interviú were correct and that Lucía had copied content from Antonio Colina. That however, was not the end of plagiarism accusations. In the year 2006, Spanish psychologist Jorge Castelló sued Lucía for plagiarism. She was accused of using his article in the first chapter of her book “Ya no sufro por amor”, and was alleged for mixing the article’s sentences with her own. The major issue was associated with the lack of reference and quotations that could separate the copied content and make it appear as proper quotations from a different writer.