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María Zambrano Alarcón (April 22, 1904 – February 6, 1991) was a Spanish philosopher, intellectual, and essayist. Her extensive work between poetic reflection and civic engagement was not recognized in Spain until the last quarter of the 20th century, after a nearly 45-year-long exile. In 1988, Zambrano became the first woman to receive the Premio Cervantes, the highest literary honor in the Spanish-speaking world. She is increasingly regarded as one of the most important voices of the 20th century, and Spanish scholarship often places her alongside thinkers such as Simone Weil and Hannah Arendt, as well as her close friend and contemporary Rosa Chacel.

Zambrano's works engage with a broad range of topics, including philosophy, poetry, democratic theory, liberalism, humanism, and education . She also returned repeatedly to the figure of Antigone, exile, memory, time, religion, nature, artistic imagination, and dreams. Her writing style is distinctive, characterized by symbolism, metaphor, and an idiosyncratic, spiral-like structure. She is best known for developing a unique concept of “poetic reason” : an attempt to transcend the limiting coordinates of Enlightenment rationality by reintegrating dimensions of human experience marginalized by modernity — poetry, imagination, emotion, intuition, interiority, and dreams — into a richer, more expansive conception of reason. Zambrano's legacy is reflected in the many journals, seminars, professorships, libraries, scholarly prizes, schools, streets, and monuments that bear her name across Spain, Europe and Latin America, as well as in the María Zambrano Foundation, a research institute and cultural center in Spain which contains her complete archive and library.

María Zambrano was born on April 22, 1904, in Vélez-Málaga, a small town in southern Spain, the daughter of two schoolteachers. She studied philosophy at the Central University of Madrid, where in the 1920s and 30s she became a close student and collaborator of the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, joining the intellectual circles of the Revista de Occidente and the Generation of 1927. Zambrano participated in the establishment of the Second Spanish Republic (1931-1939), Spain's first attempt at modern democracy, and contributed to educational initiatives such as the "Misiones Pedagógicas", a program to bring arts and literacy to rural communities, and published articles on civic engagement, education, and the role of women in society.

During the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), Zambrano worked in Valencia organizing the evacuation of orphaned children from war zones, writing and editing the newspaper Hora de España, and coordinating the participation of intellectuals in the defense of the Republic. At the end of the war and beginning of the Franco dictatorship in 1939, Zambrano crossed the Pyrenees into exile among half a million refugees, drafting her book Philosophy and Poetry as she went. Her exile would last over forty years, taking her through Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Rome, and France, marked by significant hardship and financial difficulty. Yet, everywhere she went, she wrote prolifically and integrated into circles of writers, poets, and intellectuals. In total, Zambrano wrote over twenty books, hundreds of essays, journals, articles and poems, and exchanged 5,000 letters with correspondents across the world. Her years of exile produced major works including Delirium and Destiny: A Spaniard in Her Twenties, Person and Democracy, The Tomb of Antigone, and Clearings in the Forest. She returned Spain in 1984, and in the following years much of her work was recovered and began to receive serious recognition. Zambrano received the Premio Cervantes in 1988 and died in Madrid on February 6, 1991.