Javier Cercas Mena is a Spanish writer of literary fiction and a professor of Spanish literature at the University of Girona. Born in Ibahernando, provincia de Caceres in 1962, Cercas moved with his family to Tarragona when he was four years old. It was there that he studied with the Jesuits and discovered his passion for writing, inspired by the works of Jorge Luis Borges at the age of fifteen.
Cercas received his degree in Spanish Philology from the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona in 1985 and later earned his doctorate. He spent two years working at the University of Illinois in Urbana, where his first novel, El móvil, was published. Since 1989, he has been a professor of Spanish literature at the University of Girona. Cercas is married and has one child.
Cercas gained widespread recognition with his third novel, Soldados de Salamina, which was discovered by Mario Vargas Llosa in a well-known article and received praise from John Maxwell Coetzee and Susan Sontag. He is a regular contributor to the Catalan edition and the Sunday supplement of the newspaper El País. Cercas's work has been translated into over twenty languages, and he has also translated works by contemporary Catalan authors and H. G. Wells into Spanish.