Javier Cercas in conversation with Malcolm Otero Barral

Javier Cercas, winner of the 2019 Planeta Prize, whisks us away to the dark places of the apparently calm region of Terra Alta when the owners of an important company in the area, Gráficas Adell, are found dead with signs of having suffered terrible torture. A young policeman and avid reader who arrived from Barcelona four years ago is put in charge of the case; he has a dark past that he hopes he has buried under an apparently orderly life. The author himself claimed in his essay “The Blind Spot” (Literatura Random House, 2015) that at the centre of certain novels, such as Don Quixote or Moby Dick, there is a blind spot through which it is impossible to see anything. “It is through that darkness that those novels receive their light; it is precisely through that silence that these novels become eloquent”.

Javier Cercas (Ibahernando, 1962) is the author of the successful award-winning “Soldiers of Salamis” (Tusquets, 2001) professor of Spanish literature at the University of Girona, Honorary Fellow of Oxford University and honorary professor at the Diego Portales University in Chile. Author of such novels as “Outlaws”, “The Impostor” or “Lord of All the Dead” (Literatura Random House, 2012, 2014 and 2017, respectively) among many others, he has also written books of articles, chronicles and essays that transcend the genre, strictly speaking: “Real Stories” (Acantilado, 2000), “The Literary Works of Gonzalo Suárez” (1994) and “The Truth of Agamemnon” (Tusquets, 2006 and revised re-edition LRH, 2013),and he has written, alongside David Trueba, “Dialogues of Salamis” (Co-edition by Plot and Tusquets Editores 2003), a book of conversations between the author of a novel that has been made into a film and the director of that film. He has received important awards and recognitions for his career, and his work has been translated into more than thirty languages. “Terra Alta” (Editorial Planeta, 2019), winner of the Planeta Prize, and its sequel “Independence” (Tusquets, 2021) are his latest novels.

Malcolm Otero Barral (Barcelona, 1973) is a Spanish language editor at Grupo Enciclopèdia and a column writer. He has edited authors in translation such as Jhumpa Lahiri, J.M. Coetzee, Dave Eggers, Jonathan Franzen or Gao Xingjian and Spanish authors such as Marta Sanz, Ignacio Martínez de Pisón, David Trueba, Jordi Soler, Andrés Trapiello, Juan José Saer or Alberto Manguel. He contributes on a weekly basis to Catalan radio and has written for such media El País, El Mundo, El Periódico or Letras Libres. He is the author of stories and essays and co-author of “The Club of the Abominables” (Ediciones B, 2018).