Friday 19 June 2020

RIP Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Spanish novelist Carlos Ruiz Zafón has passed away at the far-too-young age of 55.


Zafón was best-known for the Cemetery of Forgotten Books series. This series launched in 2001 with The Shadow of the Wind, which became one of the biggest-selling novels of the 21st Century. It was followed by The Angel's Game (2008), The Prisoner of Heaven (2011) and The Labyrinth of Spies (2016).

Zafón also wrote four young adult novels: The Prince of Mist (1993), The Midnight Palace (1994), The Watcher in the Shadows (1995) and Marina (1999), as well as short stories. In the 1990s he movd to Los Angeles to work as a screenwriter but found the work unrewarding, so switched to prose fiction.

Zafón passed away earlier today from colorectal cancer, which he'd been battling for two years. The enormous sales success of The Shadow of the Wind and its sequels (over 40 million copies, by some counts) made him, by some counts, the most-read Spanish author since Cervantes.
Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands... its spirit grows and strengthens.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

If you haven’t read his books you are missing one of the best writer of our time to do so would be his best memorial.

Natstown said...

Well this is devastating. Shadow of the Wind is my favorite non-sff novel and his writing was gorgeous. RIP