The Author

Leonardo Padura is the most-read contemporary Cuban writer in the world the last decade. He is the winner of the 2015 Princess of Asturias award which he won in Spain receiving it with a baseball in hand, being baseball his biggest passion. The novel The man who loved the dogs in which Padura reconstruct the life of the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky and his assassination in Mexico gave Padura most of his recognition, precisely because in a Cuba that the writer was not only prohibited by the regime but simply in-existence, the author of Red Havana was erased from history.  With time also in  Cuba, despite his criticism of the Castro regime and the as he describes,  "raw and tragic, " reality of cuba , he received the National Literature Prize in 2012.

He was born in 1955 in Mantilla, a small neighborhood of Cuba. Same neighborhood in which his great-grandfather, grandfather and father were born and raised. Padora still living in this place in which he has created a feeling of belonging with this place that is a bit the Macondo of the Padura family. The writer had a childhood that he considered, “absolutely normal and happy, because it was a time when boys spent the day in the street wearing long pants and shirtless, playing baseball. We had almost total freedom,” these were the first years of Castro’s regime in the island. He married 28 years ago and moved to the same house where he grew up. In 1980,  he graduated in Hispanic American literature at the University of Havana, and after an outstanding career as a researcher, the journalist began to cultivate the essay and writing scripts.

The Cuban novelist decided to switch from journalism to literature in 1995 after working for Gaceta de Cuba. By this time due to economic crisis in Cuba, being a writer was allowed.

“So I launched into that without having money, or editorial, but with the spiritual and professional need to do it, on January 1, 1996. Thirteen days later I am called from Spain that I won the Gijón Novel prize, with Masks. The prize meant 2 million pesetas, about 16 thousand dollars approximately. And two months later the director of the Tusquets publishing house told me that they were interested in publishing my novel and starting a working relationship with me.”