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 Nuria Amat was born in Barcelona, Spain, where she now lives. She has spent long periods in Colombia, Mexico, Berlin, Paris and the United States. Amat holds a PhD in Information Science and Technology (Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona) and has taught at the Faculty of Library and Information Science, University of Barcelona. Her novels and short stories have established her as one of the foremost Spanish authors in recent years. She has also published essays and poetry, as well as written for the press and the theatre.

Noted for the quality of her prose as well as for her innovative approach to literature from her very first works (the novel Pan de boda and the short stories in El ladrón de libros), Amat has heralded metaliterary fiction for Spanish-speaking audiences in such books as Todos somos Kafka and Viajar es muy difícil, both recently reissued and translated. Her play Pat’s Room was premiered in Barcelona in 1997, the same year she started publishing a string of novels that ensured global visibility for her work: La intimidad, El país del alma (shortlisted for the
Rómulo Gallegos International Novel Prize in 2001), and Reina de América, which won the Ciudad de Barcelona Award in 2002. Amat’s work
has been translated to English, French, Italian, Hungarian, Romanian, Arabic, Portuguese, and Swedish. Queen Cocaine, the English version of
Reina de América, was shortlisted for the renowned IMPAC literary award in 2007. Her two most recent novels are Deja que la vida llueva sobre mí (2008), and Amor y Guerra, winner of the Ramon Llull Catalan Literary Award in 2011, and published in Catalan (Edicions 62), Spanish (Planeta) and French (Éditions Robert Laffont). Letra herida, El libro mudo, Escribir y caller and Juan Rulfo, an original biography of the renowned Mexican writer, stand out among Amat’s published essays. She has collected her poetry in Amor infiel (2004), an extraordinary recreation of Emily Dickinson’s poetic universe, and Poemas impuros
(2008).
In November 2008, she was invited by Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel García Márquez to participate as guest lecturer at the Julio Cortázar
Seminar in Mexico.