Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Carlos Ruiz Zafón was a Spanish novelist born in Barcelona on 25 September 1964. He came from a family outside the literary establishment: his grandparents had worked in a factory, and his father sold insurance. Before he became known around the world for fiction, Ruiz Zafón began his working life in advertising. In the 1990s he moved to Los Angeles, where he worked briefly in screenwriting, and he was fluent in English. He died of colorectal cancer in Los Angeles on 19 June 2020.

Ruiz Zafón first made his name with young adult fiction. His debut novel, El príncipe de la niebla (1993), later translated as The Prince of Mist, won the Edebé literary prize for young adult fiction. He followed it with El palacio de la medianoche (1994), Las luces de septiembre (1995), and Marina (1999). These early books came before the adult novels that would carry his work to a much wider readership.

In 2001 he published La sombra del viento, translated into English by Lucia Graves as The Shadow of the Wind in 2004. The Gothic mystery follows Daniel Sempere as he tries to find the man destroying every book written by the author Julian Carax. The novel sold 15 million copies, received critical acclaim around the world, and won numerous awards. In 2007, eighty-one Latin American and Spanish writers and critics included it on a list of the one hundred best books in Spanish of the previous twenty-five years.

The Shadow of the Wind became the center of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books series. Ruiz Zafón continued it with El juego del ángel (2008), translated as The Angel’s Game, a prequel set in Barcelona in the 1920s and 1930s and narrated by the young writer David Martín. El prisionero del cielo followed in 2011, returning to Daniel Sempere and the 1940s, and appeared in English as The Prisoner of Heaven in 2012. The fourth and final book, El laberinto de los espíritus, was released in Spain and Latin America in 2016 and in English as The Labyrinth of Spirits in 2018.

The shape of Ruiz Zafón’s fiction came from several directions. His influences included nineteenth-century classics, crime fiction, noir authors, and contemporary writers. Films and screenwriting also mattered greatly to him. In interviews, he said he found it easier to visualize scenes in a cinematic way, a habit that suited the lush worlds and curious characters he created. His books have been published in more than 45 countries and translated into more than 50 languages, making him, by those figures, the most widely published contemporary Spanish writer.

For a quotes reader, Ruiz Zafón’s appeal is easy to understand. His fiction often joined mystery, memory, books, and danger, but his observations could be plainspoken too. “People tend to complicate their own lives as if living weren't already complicated enough,” he wrote. That mix of atmosphere and direct human recognition helps explain why readers in so many languages have kept returning to his pages.