Juan José Millás

Juan José Millás (born 1946) is a Spanish writer and winner of the 1990 Premio Nadal. He was born in Valencia and has spent most of his life in Madrid, where he studied philosophy and literature at the Universidad Complutense.

In his numerous works—which are mostly psychological and introspective—any daily fact can become a fantastic event. He created his own personal literary genre, the articuento, in which an everyday story is transformed into a fantasy that allows the reader to see reality more critically. His weekly columns in El País have generated a great number of followers who appreciate the subtlety and originality of his point of view in dealing with current events, as well as his commitment to social justice and the quality of his writing. His works have been translated into 23 languages, among them: English, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Dutch. In his 2006 novel, titled Laura y Julio, we find his principal obsessions expressed: the problem of identity, symmetry, other inhabitable spaces within our space, love, fidelity, and jealousy.

In 2005, he was awarded the Premio de Periodismo Francisco Cerecedo. In May 2006, he was also given an honorary doctorate by the Universidad de Turín.

On 15 October 2007, he was presented with the Premio Planeta for his autobiographical novel El mundo, some memories of childhood, almost of adolescence, that tell the story of a boy who lives on the street and whose dream is to escape that street. On 3 December 2007, he was given an honorary doctorate by the Universidad de Oviedo, together with the Asturian poet Ángel González.

On 13 October 2008, Millás was given the Premio Nacional de Narrativa.

He received the 1974 Premio Sésamo for his short novel Cerbero son las sombras and the 1990 Premio Nadal for La soledad era esto.

He received the Premio Primavera de Novela in 2002 for his book Dos Mujeres en Praga (Two Women in Prague).