Spanish · b. 1943
Mendoza trained as a lawyer, worked for years as a translator at the United Nations in New York and Geneva, and wrote his first novel on the side. The Truth about the Savolta Case appeared in 1975, the year Franco died, and is generally taken as the start of the modern Spanish novel: it broke with social realism, used the machinery of the detective story and the historical thriller, and did it with a straight face. He has alternated ever since between serious Barcelona novels and a comic detective series narrated by an unnamed lunatic released from an asylum whenever the police need him. He won the Cervantes Prize in 2016. His subject is Barcelona — its two great exhibitions, its gangsters, its property speculation, its habit of demolishing itself every fifty years and calling it progress.