Portrait of the day: Lucía Sánchez Saornil

Lucía Sánchez Saornil was born on December 13, 1895, in Madrid, Spain. She was a Spanish poet, militant anarchist, and feminist. She is best known as one of the founders of Mujeres Libres. She wrote her poems under the male pen name Luciano de San Saor. By 1919 she had been published in several journals, including Los Quijotes, Tableros, Plural, Manantial, and La Gaceta Literaria. Despite being a prominent figure in her time, her work is still missing from modern discussions on the poetry of her day.

In the 1920s, Sánchez Saornil began to affiliate herself with the anarcho-syndicalist movement. She participated in a labor strike in 1931, and then the Solidaridad Internacional Antifascista (SIA). She died from breast cancer in 1970.