Infatuations (Marias) - Author Bio

Author Bio
• Birth—September, 20, 1951
• Where—Madrid, Spain
• Education—University of Madrid
• Awards—International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; Prix
   Femina Etranger; Romulo Gallegos Prize (Venezuela); Prix
   Formentor
• Currently—lives in Madrid, Spain


Javier Marias is a Spanish novelist, translator, and columnist. The recipient of numerous prizes, he has written thirteen novels, three story collections, and nineteen works of collected articles and essays. His books have been translated into forty-three languages, in fifty-two countries, and have sold more than seven million copies throughout the world.

Marías was born in Madrid. His father was the philosopher Julian Marias, 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. Marias's first literary employment consisted in translating Dracula scripts for his maternal uncle, Jesus Franco. He was educated at the Colegio Estudio in Madrid.

Writing
Marias began writing in earnest at an early age. "The Life and Death of Marcelino Iturriaga," one of the short stories in While the Women are Sleeping (2010), was written when he was just 14. He wrote his first novel, The Dominions of the Wolf (1971) at age 17, after running away to Paris. His second novel, Voyage Along the Horizon (1973), was an adventure story about an expedition to Antarctica.

After attending the Complutense University of Madrid, Marias turned his attention to translating English novels into Spanish. His translations included work by Updike, Hardy, Conrad, Nabokov, Faulkner, Kipling, James, Stevenson, Browne, and Shakespeare. In 1979 he won the Spanish national award for translation for his version of Sterne's Tristram Shandy. Between 1983 and 1985 he lectured in Spanish literature and translation at the University of Oxford.

In 1986 Marias published The Man of Feeling and, in 1989, All Souls, which was set at Oxford University. The Spanish film director Gracia Querejeta released El Último viaje de Robert Rylands, adapted from All Souls, in 1996.

His 1992 novel A Heart So White was a commercial and critical success, with Marias and Margaret Jull Costa (the translator) becoming joint winners of the 1997 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His 1994 novel, Tomorrow in the Battle Think On Me, won the Venezuelan Rómulo Gallegos Prize.

The protagonists of the novels written since 1986 are all interpreters or translators of one kind or another, based on his own experience as a translator and teacher of translation at Oxford University. Of these protagonists, Marías has written, "They are people who are renouncing their own voices."

In 2002 Marías published Your Face Tomorrow 1: Fever and Spear, the first part of a trilogy that is his most ambitious literary project. The first volume is dominated by a translator, an elderly don based on an actual professor emeritus of Spanish studies at Oxford University, Sir Peter Russell. The second volume, Your Face Tomorrow 2: Dance and Dream, was published in 2004. In 2007, Marias the completed the final installment, Your Face Tomorrow 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell.

Marias operates a small publishing house under the name of Reino de Redonda. He also writes a weekly column in El País. An English version of his column "La Zona Fantasma" is published in the monthly magazine The Believer.

Marias was elected to the Royal Spanish Academy in 2006. At his investiture in 2008 he agreed with Robert Louis Stevenson that the work of novelists is "pretty childish," but also argued that it is impossible to narrate real events, and that “you can only fully tell stories about what has never happened, the invented and imagined.” (Adapted from Wikipedia and the publisher. Retrieved 11/01/2013.)