Santiago Alba Rico

Santiago Alba Rico is a writer and essayist. He studied philosophy at the Complutense University of Madrid. In the nineteen-eighties, he was a screenwriter for the universally popular television programme La bola de cristal and has published around twenty books on politics, philosophy and literature, as well as three stories for children and a play. His work includes the essays Las reglas del caos (“The rules of chaos”) (finalist for the 1995 Anagrama prize), La ciudad intangible (“The Intangible city”) (2000), El islam jacobino (“Jacobean Islam”) (2002), Vendrá la realidad y nos encontrará dormidos (“Reality will
come and will find us asleep”) (2006), Leer con niños (“Reading with children”) (2007, republished in 2015), Capitalismo y nihilismo (“Capitalism and nihilism”) (2007), El naufragio del hombre (“The failure of man”) (2009), Noticias (“News”) (2010) and Penúltimos días (“Penultimate days”) (Los Libros de la
Catarata, 2016). Since 1988 he has been living in the Arab world, having translated the Egyptian poet Naguib Surur and the Iraqi novelist Mohammed Jydair into Spanish. For years he has taught literature at the Cervantes Institute. His latest books are Ser o no ser (un cuerpo) (“To be or not to be (a body)”) (Seix Barral, 2017), Todo el pasado por delante (“All the past ahead”) (Los Libros de la Catarata, 2017) and Nadie está seguro con un libro en las manos (“No one is safe with a book in their hands”) (Catarata, 2018) . He regularly collaborates with a variety of news media (Público, Cuarto Poder, CTXT and Atlántica XXII, among others). In 2019 he has published Última hora (“Breaking news”), which contains his radio collaborations with the programme Carne Cruda.