"Juan Cruz stands out in everything he writes, his chronicles, his interviews, his newspaper articles. Sometimes rendered in swift and precise strokes, at other times melancholic and unhurried. But where he is truly a master is in description and evocation: places, eras, people the reader may never have known end up transformed in his books into familiar childhood landscapes, longed-for times, and excellent friends whom one remembers, from then on, with moving clarity."
——Javier Marías

*A privileged window onto a series of conversations with some of the finest thinkers and writers of our time, many of them legends of the Spanish-language literature, conducted by one of the most inquisitive and passionate interviewers in Spain today.

The interview is a universal genre that thrives on dialogue. In the Spanish language, there is a rich tradition of great interviewers who have practised interviewing not only as an informative genre, but also as a literary one. Juan Cruz is one of the leading exponents of the art of interviewing in Spanish today.

The first time he interviewed someone, he was thirteen years old and standing on a small step stool so he could reach the telephone in his family home in Tenerife. His interviewee was one of Franco’s military officers, who also worked as a football coach, and that day would change Juan Cruz’s life forever. Since then, Juan Cruz has never stopped asking questions, working as a journalist and interviewer for some of the most important Spanish language media outlets, with a particular focus on culture and literature—his great passion.

This book, which brings together around thirty of the finest interviews he has conducted over the past five decades, bears witness to the intellectual curiosity that drives great journalism. Taken together, these conversations—like the figures at their centre and the works they created—are unforgettable, satisfying not only Juan Cruz’s own thirst for knowledge but, incidentally, our own as well.

Including interviews with: Orhan Pamuk * Claudio Magris * Octavio Paz * José Saramago * Susan Sontag * John Berger * Jorge Semprún * Paul Bowles * María Zambrano * Günter Grass * Mario Vargas Llosa * Javier Marías * Cristina Fernández Cubas * Jorge Amado * Miguel Delibes * Ismail Kadaré * Antonio Muñoz Molina * Doris Lessing, among others.

Journalist and writer born in Santa Cruz de Tenerife. His work spans many areas, from reporting to news coverage and from chronicles to interviews. By the age of fifteen he was already part of his first newsroom at the weekly journal Aire Libre, which combined sports coverage with literary interests. He was a correspondent in London for El País and, always at that newspaper, he held positions of responsibility, especially in the Culture section. He has been associated with Prensa Ibérica, where he currently contributes. Between 1992 and 1998, he served as director of the publishing house Alfaguara. He is the author of numerous books related to journalism, fiction, and (auto)biography, including Crónica de la nada hecha pedazos (1973, Benito Pérez Armas Prize), El sueño de Oslo (1988, Azorín Novel Prize), Retrato de un hombre desnudo (2005), Egos revueltos: Una memoria personal de la vida literaria (2009, Comillas Prize for History, Biography, and Memoir), Contra el insulto (2011), Ciudadano Polanco (2021), and Secreto y pasión de la literatura. Los escritores en primera persona (2025). In 2012, he was awarded the National Prize for Cultural Journalism.

AWARDS & HONOURS
* Azorín Novel Prize
* Comillas Prize for History, Biography
and Memoir
* National Prize for Cultural Journalism