Javier Marías is an award-winning Spanish novelist. He is also a translator and columnist, as well as the current king of Redonda. He has been translated into 34 languages, and more than six million copies of his books have been sold worldwide. He currently lives in Madrid.
Background
Javier Marías was born on September 20, 1951 in Madrid, Spain. His father was the philosopher Julián Marías, who was briefly imprisoned and then banned from teaching for opposing Franco. Parts of his childhood were spent in the United States, where his father taught at various institutions, including Yale University and Wellesley College. His mother died when Javier was 26 years old.
Education
Javier Marías received his education at the Colegio Estudio in Madrid. Marías continued his education at Complutense University of Madrid.
Career
Javier Marias began writing fiction in 1971 at age twenty. In addition, he has translated many English classics into Spanish, including the works of Thomas Hardy, Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad, W. B. Yeats, and Laurence Sterne. One of his earlier novels, El Siglo, is a story about destiny in which a father tells his son, Casaldaliga, to seek his own destiny, but the boy learns that his father has not followed his own advice.
His next book Todas las Almas (All Souls) is a novel based on Marias’s two and a half years as a lecturer in Spanish literature at Oxford University and his romance with a married colleague. Marías's novel, Todas las almas (All Souls), included a portrayal of the poet John Gawsworth, who was also the third King of Redonda. Although the fate of this monarchy after the death of Gawsworth is contested, the portrayal by Marías so affected the "reigning" king, Jon Wynne-Tyson, that he abdicated and left the throne to Marías in 1997.
This course of events was chronicled in his "false novel," Negra espalda del tiempo (Dark Back of Time). The book was inspired by the reception of Todas las almas by many people who, falsely according to Marías, believed they were the source of the characters in Todas las almas. Since "taking the throne" of Redonda, Marías has begun a publishing imprint named Reino de Redonda ("Kingdom of Redonda").
Then followed Corazon Tan Blanco (A Heart So White), a story narrated in the first person. Marías currently operates a small publishing house under the name of Reino de Redonda. He also writes a weekly column in El País. In 2005 - 2006 an English version of his column, "La Zona Fantasma", appeared in the monthly magazine The Believer.
Views
Marías is forever redrawing the thin line that separates illusion from reality, and they are central elements of his work.
Personality
In person, Marías presents a fine balance of opposing qualities—alternately a grandee and a recluse, gregarious and reticent, punctilious and totally laid-back. Like the ghostly narrators in his novels, he is a little hard to pin down. He tends to perch rather than sit on his couch and to overenunciate when he speaks in English. He habitually drinks Coca-Cola, subsists on a diet of serrano ham and Manchego cheese, and will not wear a tie unless it is pressed upon him. Marías has a blog but has never seen it and refers to it only as “the Web that wears my name.”