Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Carlos Ruiz Zafón was born in Barcelona on September 25, 1964. The city he grew up in became the setting for almost everything he wrote: narrow streets, old bookshops, shuttered mansions and the heavy memory of the Civil War and the years after it. Before books, he worked in advertising, which taught him to say a lot in very little space.

His literary career began with young adult fiction. The Prince of Mist, published in Spanish in 1993, won the Edebé prize for young adult literature and led to The Midnight Palace (1994) and The Watcher in the Shadows (1995). Together they form the Mist Trilogy, full of mystery, haunted houses and a villain who collects on promises. Marina, from 1999, closes that phase and already hints at the shadowy Barcelona to come.

In the 1990s Zafón moved to Los Angeles and spent a while writing screenplays. He said film shaped his writing and that he pictured scenes as camera shots. In his novels it shows in the lighting, the atmosphere and the cuts between chapters, with something always lurking in the dark.

In 2001 Planeta published The Shadow of the Wind. Daniel, a bookseller's son, is taken to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a secret library where every visitor adopts one book and swears to protect it. He picks a novel by Julián Carax and learns that someone is burning every other copy of the author's work. The book had been a finalist for the Fernando Lara prize and grew by word of mouth into a phenomenon. Lucia Graves's English translation came out in 2004, and sales went past 15 million copies.

From there, Zafón built a cycle of four novels that connect without depending on one another. The Angel's Game (2008) goes back to the 1920s with a writer hired by a mysterious publisher. The Prisoner of Heaven (2011) tells the past of Fermín, Daniel's unforgettable friend. The Labyrinth of the Spirits (2016) closes the series with an investigation in the basements of the Franco regime. Zafón said the books can be read in any order.

His style blends gothic novel, 19th-century serial and thriller. The prose is rich in imagery and dry humor, the villains are larger than life and the love of books is on every page. Behind the mystery sits a portrait of censorship, fear and violence in Franco's Spain. His work has been published in more than 45 countries and translated into more than 50 languages.

Zafón died of cancer in Los Angeles on June 19, 2020, at 55. A few months later, Planeta released The City of Mist, a collection of stories that echo the characters and themes of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. As of October 2026, the series has no released film or TV adaptation.