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Spanish novelist Javier Marías has died aged 70.
The author of All Souls, A Heart So White and Your Face Tomorrow (all Penguin Classics) had been ill with pneumonia for a month, and died on Sunday (11th September), his Spanish publisher Alfaguara announced.
Hamish Hamilton is his most recent publisher in the UK. Penguin Modern Classics scooped seven titles from his backlist in 2011.
Marías was born in Madrid in 1951, and published his debut novel, The Dominions of the Wolf, at the age of 20. He was a member of Spain’s Royal Academy and an international member of the UK’s Royal Society of Literature, but notably turned down Spain’s €20,000 national narrative prize for his novel The Infatuations (Hamish Hamilton) in 2012.
Simon Prosser, Hamish Hamilton publishing director, described Marías as “a truly superb and original writer with a voice entirely of his own; a master of the elegant, sinuous, always surprising sentence; a poet of the comma – the pause that isn’t an end; and an essayist of rare intelligence, wit and insight, with a weekly column in El Pais”.
He told The Bookseller: “Everything that he wrote was steeped in an encyclopaedic knowledge of literature and history, but set in a world of contemporary mores, politics and passions. He was a connoisseur not just of Shakespeare and of antiquarian booksellers, but also of football and film.
“He was a great Anglophile, with perfect English, who began his writing career as a translator and spent an important time in his life in Oxford. He returned here often, though sadly not after Brexit, a development which horrified him, made worse by increasingly draconian laws against smoking, in hotels and on university campuses. (He was a smoker of great elegance and commitment).
“In conversation, he was as compelling as in his writing: those long sentences, with multiple clauses, always landing exactly where he wanted them to.
“He was one of the greats of contemporary literature, constantly tipped for the Nobel, which sadly, like W G Sebald, with whom he is often compared, he never won. A bestseller in Spain as well as other European countries, he was also an immensely popular writer among readers. And for good reason: once hooked, it is very hard to put a book by Marías down. In addition to those enveloping sentences, his work is marked by a great technical ability to build suspense and mystery. Indeed, the shadow world of spy craft and espionage, particularly our own British version, was one to which he was constantly drawn.”
He added: “I will miss him deeply, both as a writer and as a person.”