Translation Rights TQE / Scrambled egos. A personal memoir of literary life

XXII Comillas Prize for History, Biography and Memoirs 2009

The journalist Juan Cruz confesses in these memoirs that from a very early age he felt a great curiosity about the hidden aspects of creators, about their concerns, ambitions, anxieties and obsessions. After forty years dedicating himself to cultural journalism and six years directing a prestigious publishing house, his curiosity regarding the souls of artists and the highs and lows of literary creation is as strong as it ever was, but enriched with the experience of having been able to interview, accompany as an editor or, in short, get to know personally writers such as Borges, Bowles, Cortázar, Benet, Cabrera Infante, Susan Sontag, Günter Grass, Jorge Semprún, Rafael Azcona, Severo Sarduy, Camilo José Cela, Francisco Umbral, Eduardo Haro Tecglen or Vázquez Montalbán.

A text that is halfway between the journalistic report and the detailed and rigorous tale of a subjective memory, capable of recreating the most human, personal and creative side of the principal characters of European and Latin American literary life over the past few decades.

“Juan Cruz is within literature, obviously, due to pure passion.” Heraldo de Aragón

“Many of us wish to have seen what he has been able to see. Lucky for us, he has decided to tell about it.” La Voz de Galicia

Juan Cruz Ruiz was born in Puerto de la Cruz, Tenerife in 1948. He has been a journalist from an early age and has been closely bound to the newspaper El País since its foundation in 1976, and has worked in different culture and editorial sections. He directed the publishing house Alfaguara between 1992 and 1998 and was later in charge of the “Author’s Office” of the Prisa Group. He is currently working as a journalist again, as an assistant director of the newspaper El País. Author of several books, he has received, among others, the Canarias Prize for Literature, the Benito Pérez Armas Prize and the Azorín Prize for Novel.