Javier Marías

Spanish · 1951 to 2022

Born on September 20, 1951, in Madrid to the philosopher Julián Marías, briefly imprisoned and then barred from teaching for opposing Franco, and the writer Dolores Franco Manera, Javier Marías grew up in a household of five sons surrounded by his father's books and his uncle Jesús Franco's film scripts. Stretches of his childhood were spent in the United States, where his exiled father taught at Yale and Wellesley. He ran away to Paris at seventeen and finished his first novel in his uncle's flat at nineteen. He translated Tristram Shandy into Spanish, winning the national translation prize in 1979, and rendered Conrad, Nabokov, Faulkner, and Sir Thomas Browne into a Spanish prose that would shape his own long sinuous sentences. He lectured at Oxford in Spanish literature and translation from 1983 to 1985, and the experience produced All Souls (1989), a melancholy comedy of donnish manners and adultery set in the colleges. A Heart So White (1992), opening with a young bride who shoots herself at her own honeymoon dinner table, won the IMPAC Dublin Award in 1997 jointly with his translator Margaret Jull Costa. The Your Face Tomorrow trilogy, completed in 2007, drew on his father's wartime work for British intelligence and is widely held to be his finest achievement. His novels were translated into forty-six languages and sold close to nine million copies internationally. He was made the eccentric King of Redonda in 1997 by the previous incumbent, ennobling fellow writers as his nobility. Elected to the Real Academia Española in 2006, he wrote a weekly column for El País until the week of his death. He died of pneumonia in Madrid on September 11, 2022, at the age of seventy.