Javier Cercas

Javier Cercas Mena (born 1962 in Ibahernando) is a Spanish writer and professor of Spanish literature at the University of Girona, Spain.

He 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.