Javier Cercas was born in
Ibahernando,
Cáceres, Spain. He is a frequent contributor to the
Catalan edition of
El País and the Sunday supplement. He worked for two years at the
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in
Illinois, United States. He is part of a group of well-known Spanish novelists who have published "historical memory" fiction, focusing on the
Spanish Civil War and
Francoist state, including
Julio Llamazares,
Andrés Trapiello, and
Jesús Ferrero.
Soldiers of Salamis (translated by
Anne McLean) won the
Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2004. McLean's translations of his novels
The Speed of Light and
Outlaws were also shortlisted for the
International Dublin Literary Award, in 2008 and 2016 respectively. During the 2014–15
academic year, he was the Weidenfeld Visiting Professor of European Comparative Literature at
St Anne's College at
Oxford, England. He was awarded the 2016
European Book Prize for
The Impostor. In 2025 he released ''God's Fool'', which he described as a "non-fiction novel", being a mixture of chronicle, autobiography and biography, about his travel to
Mongolia with
Pope Francis and talks of religion, Christianity in particular, while himself being
atheist and
anti-clerical. ==Bibliography==