Javier Cercas was born in 1962. He is a novelist, short-story writer and essayist, whose books include El móvil (The Motive, 1987, revised edition 2003), El inquilino (The Tenant, 1989), El vientre de la ballera (The Belly of the Whale, 1997) and Relatos reales (True Tales, 2000). In the 1980s he taught for two years at the University of Illinois, and since 1989 has been a lecturer in Spanish Literature at the University of Gerona. He writes a regular column for El País. Soldiers of Salamis has been made into a film by David Trueba and is being published in twenty languages so far.
