Ildefonso Falcones

A practising lawyer with his own office in the Eixample district of Barcelona, Ildefonso Falcones de Sierra was born in that city in 1959 and wrote his early fiction around the working week. At seventeen he was junior show jumping champion of Spain, and his father's death that same year ended the sporting career. He read economics before dropping it for law, paying his way with a job in a bingo hall. La catedral del mar (2006), set in fourteenth century Barcelona, made his name and has been translated widely. La reina descalza, published by Grijalbo in 2013, moves forward to eighteenth century Spain and follows Caridad, a woman freed from slavery in Cuba, and Milagros, a young Romani singer, through years of official persecution of the Roma and the early shaping of flamenco. Falcones and his wife Carmen Rosich were pursued for years over the tax treatment of 1.4 million euros in copyright income, stood trial in Barcelona in June 2021 with prosecutors asking nine years, and were acquitted that November; the prosecution appealed.