Javier Marias was born in Madrid in 1951 and died in 2022. He published fifteen novels, three collections of short stories and several volumes of essays. His work has been translated into forty-three languages and has won a dazzling array of international literary awards, including the prestigious Dublin IMPAC award for A Heart So White. He was also a highly practised translator into Spanish of English authors, including Joseph Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Thomas Browne and Laurence Sterne. He held academic posts in Spain, the United States and in Britain, as Lecturer in Spanish Literature at Oxford University.
A writer who loves the propulsiveness of the thriller, the page-turning compulsion that drives a reader through Eric Ambler or John le Carré * Financial Times * Mariás demonstrates why so many of his peers believe him to be among the greatest of contemporary novelists * The Herald * This is a spy thriller, but it reads like one transposed into music . . . Marías mesmerises us again and we are swept on by the long, powerful swells of his prose * Guardian * The most subtle and gifted writer in contemporary Spanish literature * Boston Globe * A Marías sentence is a place of infinite richness and surprises * Independent * No one else, anywhere, is writing quite like this * Daily Telegraph * Unquestionably the most significant Spanish writer of his generation * Observer * [Marías] uses language like an anatomist uses a scalpel to lay bare the innermost secrets of that strangest of species, the human being -- W. G. Sebald What makes Marías novels enthralling . . . is the irresistible, ruminative, allusive, Jamesian narrative voice * Daily Telegraph * A Spanish literary great . . . His writing is fine and subtle * Le Monde * Javier Marías's writing doesn't resemble anyone else's. It's easy to parody, but impossible to imitate . . . Javier Marias was the best writer in Spain -- Eduardo Mendoza Marías occupied a reputational perch in Spanish culture that would be almost inconceivable for an American author . . . Most considered him the greatest living Spanish writer * New York Times *