Javier Cercas

Javier Cercas is a Spanish novelist and journalist born in 1962 in Ibahernando, Cáceres. He is one of Spain's most celebrated and internationally recognized contemporary novelists, known for metafictional novels that blur the boundaries between history, journalism, and fiction. He is a professor of Spanish literature at the University of Girona. Cercas's breakthrough came with Soldados de Salamina (Soldiers of Salamis, 2001), a novel about a journalist researching the story of an anarchist officer who saved a Francoist propagandist from execution during the Spanish Civil War. The novel sold millions of copies and was adapted into a film, establishing Cercas as a major figure in international literary fiction. His subsequent novels include La velocidad de la luz (2005), Anatomía de un instante (2009, about the 1981 coup attempt), El impostor (2014), and El móvil (2018). His fiction consistently returns to questions of memory, complicity, and the ethical obligations of the novelist toward historical truth. Terra Alta, his 2019 Premio Planeta winner, is a crime novel — the first in a trilogy — set in the Catalonia of the Terra Alta region, following a Mossos d'Esquadra detective investigating a brutal murder. The trilogy continues Cercas's engagement with the legacy of the Spanish Civil War while embracing crime fiction conventions. Cercas is one of the most important Spanish novelists of his generation, internationally recognized and widely translated.