The Ministry of Culture, through the National Library of Spain (BNE), has acquired the personal archive of Javier Marías, valued at half a million euros and comprising typed originals, drafts, and correspondence, along with the widow’s donation of an “important collection of pieces.”
The acquisition, published on the Public Sector Procurement Platform, will become part of the BNE’s collections.
In addition to this acquisition, the donation to the National Library of Spain is being made by the writer’s widow, Carme López Rodríguez-Mercader, of an important collection of pieces, among which his personal library stands out, part of the correspondence maintained with other writers and that Marías kept inside their books, photographs and other audiovisual materials, records and other varied documentation. The incorporation of this documentary collection will allow “to preserve in a single institution all of Javier Marías’s work” in its various stages of creation, from the initial versions of the texts to the final ones, contributing to “a greater knowledge about the author and his work” and facilitating studies and research on “one of the most relevant figures in contemporary Spanish literature,” explains the Ministry.
Javier Marías Franco, born in Madrid in 1951, was a writer, translator and editor, and a member of the Royal Spanish Academy from 2008 until his death in 2022. He published his first novel, The Domains of the Wolf, in 1971, and from 1977 he regularly contributed to the press. An author of an extensive body of work for which he has received numerous national and international prizes, and the publication of All Souls in 1989 marked his definitive rise as a novelist. In 2002 and 2007 he published Your Face Tomorrow, a monumental autobiographical-tinged novel in three parts.