Olga Merino

A writer with a long career as a journalist, which has taken her to live in cities like London and Moscow, she made her debut as a novelist in 1999 with the critically acclaimed Cenizas rojas (Red Ashes, Ediciones B), a book that draws on her years as a Russian correspondent and the experience of directly witnessing the fall of the Soviet regime. This was followed by other novels, published by Alfaguara, among them Espuelas de papel (Paper Spurs, 2004) and Perros que ladran en el sótano (Dogs That Bark in the Cellar, 2012). In 2006, she received the NH Vargas Llosa Prize for the story Las normas son las normas (Rules Are Rules, Alfaguara). At present, she is a columnist in the daily El Periódico and teaches at the Barcelona Athenaeum School of Writing. With its clear, profound gaze at suicide, her latest novel, La forastera (The Foreign Woman, Alfaguara, 2020), is a hymn to freedom and human resistance in isolation.