Javier Marías

Marías was born in Madrid to the philosopher Julián Marías, who had been jailed and blacklisted under Franco and took his family briefly into American academic exile, where young Javier spent stretches of childhood at Wellesley and Yale. He made his early reputation as a translator, rendering Sterne and Nabokov into Spanish; his translation of Tristram Shandy won Spain's National Translation Prize in 1979.

A lectureship at Oxford in the mid-1980s supplied the material for All Souls, a novel of academic intrigue, and the vantage point he returned to for decades. A Heart So White (1992) made him internationally famous for its long, spiraling, suspended sentences built around a single withheld secret. He went on to the three-volume Your Face Tomorrow and ran his own small press, Reino de Redonda, from which he styled himself, half in jest, king of a fictional realm. He died in Madrid in 2022.