Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Carlos Ruiz Zafón was born on September 25, 1964, in Barcelona, Spain. He grew up in the Gothic Quarter of Barcelona, the labyrinthine medieval neighborhood that would become the atmospheric heart of his most celebrated fiction. He studied journalism and began his career in advertising, working as a creative director for advertising agencies in Barcelona before emigrating to Los Angeles in 1994, where he worked in the American film and television industry while beginning to write fiction for young adults. His early young adult novels — The Prince of Mist (1993), The Midnight Palace (1994), and The Alchemist’s Lab (1994) — were successful in Spain and were eventually translated worldwide, but it was his turn to adult fiction that made him one of the most widely read novelists of the twenty-first century.

La Sombra del Viento — published in Spanish in 2001 and in English translation as The Shadow of the Wind in 2004 — became one of the great international literary phenomena of the decade. Set in Barcelona from the 1940s through the 1960s, during and after the Franco dictatorship, the novel opens with young Daniel Sempere being taken by his father to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books — a secret, labyrinthine library where books at risk of being lost forever are preserved. Daniel chooses a novel called The Shadow of the Wind by an unknown author named Julián Carax, and discovers that someone is systematically tracking down and burning every copy of Carax’s novels. His quest to uncover the truth about Carax becomes a coming-of-age story, a love story, a mystery, and a meditation on literature, memory, and the power of stories to outlast the forces that would destroy them.

The novel sold more than fifteen million copies worldwide and was translated into more than forty-five languages, making it the most widely read Spanish-language novel since One Hundred Years of Solitude. Ruiz Zafón followed it with three further volumes set in the same world of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books — The Angel’s Game (2008), The Prisoner of Heaven (2011), and The Labyrinth of the Spirits (2016) — completing a tetralogy that spans the darkest decades of Spanish history.

Ruiz Zafón’s prose style — rendered magnificently in Lucia Graves’s English translations — is richly atmospheric, Gothic in spirit, and deeply romantic in the literary-historical sense. He wrote in the tradition of the great nineteenth-century novelists — Dickens, Dumas, Hugo — who understood the novel as a vehicle for large emotions, intricate plots, and characters drawn with broad, confident strokes. His Barcelona is as much a character as any human figure: a city of fog and shadow, secret passages and hidden histories, where the past is always pressing up through the present. He was unashamedly in love with storytelling as an art form, and his novels are celebrations of reading itself.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón died on June 19, 2020, in Los Angeles, from colon cancer, aged fifty-five. He is mourned as one of the great popular novelists of his generation and as the writer who restored Barcelona to the world literary imagination. The Shadow of the Wind has been credited with transforming Barcelona into a literary tourist destination and with introducing millions of readers to Spanish history through the medium of a novel they could not put down. His death was a significant loss to world literature.