Spanish · b. 1948
Vila-Matas did his military service in North Africa, where he directed two short films, then went to Paris and rented a garret from Marguerite Duras, who charged him almost nothing and gave him a handwritten list of instructions on how to write a novel. He has been writing the same book ever since, in the sense that all of them are about literature: writers who stopped, writers who never started, writers who invented other writers, the sickness of thinking that life should resemble a book. Bartleby & Co. is a set of footnotes to a text that does not exist. Montano's Malady is about a man so saturated with literature that he has become a symptom. He has won the Rómulo Gallegos, the Prix Médicis étranger and the Formentor, and is more widely admired in France and Latin America than in Spain.