Spanish · b. 1956
Muñoz Molina grew up in Úbeda in Jaén, the son of market gardeners, studied art history in Granada, and worked as a municipal clerk while writing his first novels. He entered the Royal Spanish Academy at thirty-nine, the youngest member at the time, directed the Cervantes Institute in New York, and has won the Premio Nacional twice, the Planeta and the Jerusalem Prize. His novels return to the same material from different angles: a small Andalusian town he calls Mágina, the memory of the Civil War and its buried dead, the machinery of Francoist policing, and the way exile and displacement travel through the twentieth century from Spain to Central Europe to New York. He writes a weekly newspaper column that has made him one of the most read public voices in Spain, and he lives between Madrid and Lisbon.