Javier Cercas Quote
Memory is threatening to replace history in an era saturated with memory. This is bad news. Memory and history are notionally opposites: memory is individual, partial and subjective; history is collective and aspires to be comprehensive and objective. Memory and history are also complementary: history gives sense to memory; memory is a tool, an ingredient, a part of history. But memory is not history.
Javier Cercas
Memory is threatening to replace history in an era saturated with memory. This is bad news. Memory and history are notionally opposites: memory is individual, partial and subjective; history is collective and aspires to be comprehensive and objective. Memory and history are also complementary: history gives sense to memory; memory is a tool, an ingredient, a part of history. But memory is not history.
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About Javier Cercas
He was born in Ibahernando, Cáceres, Spain. He is a frequent contributor to the Catalan edition of El País and the Sunday supplement. He worked for two years at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in Illinois, United States.
He is part of a group of well-known Spanish novelists who have published "historical memory" fiction, focusing on the Spanish Civil War and Francoist state, including Julio Llamazares, Andrés Trapiello, and Jesús Ferrero.
Soldiers of Salamis (translated by Anne McLean) won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2004. McLean's translations of his novels The Speed of Light and Outlaws were also shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award, in 2008 and 2016 respectively.
During the 2014–15 academic year, he was the Weidenfeld Visiting Professor of European Comparative Literature at St Anne's College at Oxford, England. He was awarded the 2016 European Book Prize for The Imposter.