Javier Marias, one of Spain’s most renowned novelists, died on Sunday at the age of 70, his publisher announced.
The novelist died in a hospital in Madrid due to complications from a lung infection, the Spanish EFE news agency reported. He had contracted COVID-19 earlier.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez mourned Marias’s death in a tweet, describing Sunday as a “sad day for Spanish letters.” He offered his condolences to the author’s friends and family.
“His extensive and talented work will forever be a fundamental part of our literature,” Sanchez wrote.
Born on September 20, 1951 in Madrid, the Spanish author wrote 16 novels, the last of which being “Tomas Nevinson,” which he published last year.
His work received great exposure, being translated into 46 languages and selling some 9 million copies across 56 countries, according to his publisher Alfaguara.
He was considered among Spain’s most important contemporary authors. Many believed him the most likely Spaniard to win the Nobel Prize for Literature since Camilo Jose Cela in 1989.
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Nobel Literature Prize winners since 2001
2021: Abdulrazak Gurnah
Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2021 “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism,” said the Swedish Academy, who gives out the prize. “His novels recoil from stereotypical descriptions and open our gaze to a culturally diversified East Africa unfamiliar to many in other parts of the world.”
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Nobel Literature Prize winners since 2001
2020: Louise Glück
Crowned with the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2020, the American poet and essayist had already won major awards in the US, including the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, as well as the National Humanities Medal, which was presented by Barack Obama in 2016. Her most notable works include the “The Triumph of Achilles” (1985) and “The Wild Iris” (1992).
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Nobel Literature Prize winners since 2001
2019: Peter Handke
The Austrian author born in 1942 became famous with experimental plays such as “Offending the Audience” in 1966. He also co-wrote with Wim Wenders films including “Wings of Desire.” The decision to award Handke the Nobel Prize was criticized since he is also known for his controversial positions on the Yugoslav Wars. In 2014, he had also called the prize to be abolished, dubbing it a “circus.”
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Nobel Literature Prize winners since 2001
2018: Olga Tokarczuk
The Polish writer was actually awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in 2019, since it had been postponed for a year following scandals affecting the Swedish Academy, the body that chooses the laureates for the award. A two-time winner of Poland’s top literary prize, the Nike Award, Tokarczuk was also honored in 2010 with the Man Booker International Prize for her novel “Flights.”
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Nobel Literature Prize winners since 2001
2017: Kazuo Ishiguro
Japan-born British novelist, screenwriter and short story writer Kazuo Ishiguro won the 2017 award. His most renowned novel, “The Remains of the Day” (1989), was adapted into a movie starring Anthony Hopkins. His works deal with memory, time and self-delusion.
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Nobel Literature Prize winners since 2001
2016: Bob Dylan
An atypical but world famous laureate: US songwriter Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016. The Swedish Academy selected him “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.”
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Nobel Literature Prize winners since 2001
2015: Svetlana Alexievich
Calling her work “a monument to suffering and courage in our time,” the Swedish Academy honored the Belarusian author and investigative journalist in 2015 — making her only the 14th woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature since 1901. Alexievich is best known for her emotive firsthand accounts of war and suffering, including “War’s Unwomanly Face” (1985) and “Voices from Chernobyl” (2005).
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Nobel Literature Prize winners since 2001
2014: Patrick Modiano
The French writer’s stories describe a universe of haunted cities, absentee parents, criminality and lost youths. They are all set in Paris with the shadow of the Second World War looming heavily in the background. The Swedish Academy described the novelist, whose work has often focused on the Nazi occupation of France, as “a Marcel Proust of our time.”
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Nobel Literature Prize winners since 2001
2013: Alice Munro
Canadian writer Alice Munro is no stranger to accolades, having received the Man Booker International Prize and the Canadian Governor General Literary Award three times over. The Swedish Academy, which awards the annual Nobel Prize in Literature, called her a “master of the contemporary short story.”
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Nobel Literature Prize winners since 2001
2012: Mo Yan
Guan Moye, better known under his pen name Mo Yan, was praised by the Swedish Academy as a writer “who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary.” The decision was criticized by Chinese dissidents like artist Ai Weiwei, who claimed Mo Yan was too close to the Chinese Communist Party and did not support fellow intellectuals who faced political repression.
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Nobel Literature Prize winners since 2001
2011: Tomas Transtromer
The Academy chose Tomas Gosta Transtromer as the winner in 2011 “because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality.” In the 1960s, the Swedish poet worked as a psychologist at a center for juvenile offenders. His poetry has been translated into over 60 languages.
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Nobel Literature Prize winners since 2001
2010: Mario Vargas Llosa
The Peruvian novelist received the Nobel Prize “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.” In Latin America, he is famous for uttering the phrase “Mexico is the perfect dictatorship” on TV in 1990 and for punching his once-friend and fellow Nobel laureate, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, in the face in 1976.
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Nobel Literature Prize winners since 2001
2009: Herta Müller
The German-Romanian author was awarded the Nobel Prize as a writer “who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed.” She is noted for her work criticizing the repressive communist regime of Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania, which she experienced herself. Müller writes in German and moved to West Berlin in 1987.
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Nobel Literature Prize winners since 2001
2008: Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio
The Swedish Academy called J.M.G. Le Clezio an “author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization.” Le Clezio was born in Nice, France, in 1940 to a French mother and a Mauritian father. He holds dual citizenship and calls Mauritius his “little fatherland.”
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Nobel Literature Prize winners since 2001
2007: Doris Lessing
British author Doris May Lessing has written novels, plays and short stories, to name just a few of her mediums. The 93-year-old received the Nobel Prize for being a writer “who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny.” She campaigned against nuclear weapons and the Apartheid regime in South Africa.
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Nobel Literature Prize winners since 2001
2006: Orhan Pamuk
Ferit Orhan Pamuk, “who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures,” was the first Turkish author to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. With more than 11 million books sold, he is Turkey’s bestselling writer. Pamuk was born in Istanbul and currently teaches at Columbia University in New York City.
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Nobel Literature Prize winners since 2001
2005: Harold Pinter
Harold Pinter, “who in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression’s closed rooms,” was awarded the Nobel Prize three years before his death from liver cancer. He died on Christmas Eve in 2008. The British playwright directed and acted in many radio and film productions of his own work. In total, he received more than 50 awards.
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Nobel Literature Prize winners since 2001
2004: Elfriede Jelinek
The Nobel Prize was awarded to Elfriede Jelinek “for her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels” and for her plays that reveal society’s clichés. A central theme in Jelinek’s work is female sexuality. Her novel “The Piano Teacher” was the basis for the 2001 movie of the same name featuring Isabelle Huppert in the lead role.
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Nobel Literature Prize winners since 2001
2003: John Maxwell Coetzee
J. M. Coetzee, “who in innumerable guises portrays the surprising involvement of the outsider,” was also awarded the Booker Prize twice before obtaining the Nobel Prize. The Cape Town-born author became an Australian citizen in 2006. One of his best-known novels, “Disgrace” (1999), is set in post-apartheid South Africa.
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Nobel Literature Prize winners since 2001
2002: Imre Kertesz
The Jewish Hungarian Auschwitz survivor became Nobel laureate “for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history.” Kertesz, who died in March 2016, described the atrocities of concentration camps in his books. He worked over 13 years on his semi-autobiographical novel “Fatelessness,” which was first published in 1975.
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Nobel Literature Prize winners since 2001
2001: Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul
V.S. Naipaul received the Nobel Prize in 2001 for his strong storytelling and “for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.” Born in Trinidad and Tobago, the British writer has often explored the freedom of the individual in a declining society in his novels.
Author: Sabine Peschel, Elizabeth Grenier
