Juan José Millás (born 1946) is a Spanish writer and winner of the 1990 Premio Nadal. He was born in Valencia and has spent most of his life in Madrid where he studied Philosophy and Literature in the Universidad Complutense.
A Valencian of humble origins, as a child he moved with his large family in 1952 to Madrid, the city where he has lived the majority of his life. He was a poor but curious student and did the majority of his studies at night while he worked in a savings bank. At the Francoist university, in those days in the power of the regime, he began taking Philosophy and Literature, which he abandoned in his third year. He obtained a job as an administrator in Iberia and dedicated himself to reading and writing. His first novel was influenced by Julio Cortázar and possesses the accumulated evils of the experimentalism of that age and of being a fledgling author. Although very original, his second book, Cerbero son las sombras (1975), obtained the Premio Sésamo and opened critics’ doors for him.
Thanks to an enthusiastic member of a judges panel, Juan García Hortelano, he was able to then publish Visión del ahogado (1977) and El jardín vacío (The empty garden) (1981) in the prestigious editorial Alfaguara. But his most popular novel—and al the most transcendent for his work thanks to writing it with the freedom of not worrying about critics—was Papel mojado (1983), an assignment for an editorial of juvenile literature that sold and continues to sell well. Simultaneously, he began to collaborate with the press with great success, born from his imagination and his incorruptible commitment to the unfavored, so he left the employment of the Iberian press and now lives for journalism and literature.
In his numerous works, for the most part a psychological introspection, any daily fact can become a fantastic event. For that he created his own personal literary genre, the articuento, in which an everyday story is transformed by the work of fantasy into a point of view for to see the reality of critical form. His weekly columns in El País have reached a great number of followers through the subtlety and originality of his point of view in dealing with the themes of today, just as much for his great social commitment as the quality of his style. On the program La Ventana, on the channel Ser, he provides for a time slot (Fridays at 4:00) in which he encourages viewers to send short accounts about words from the diccionary. Currently, he is constructing a glossary, within which these accounts have a large role. His works have been translated into 23 languages, among them: English, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Dutch. In his 2006 novel, titled Laura y Julio, we find his principal obsessions expressed: the problem of identity, symmetry, other inhabitable spaces within our space, love, fidelity, and jealousy.
He married his second wife, Isabel Menéndez, a psychologist, in 1987. With her, he had his second child.
In 2005, he was awarded the Premio de Periodismo Francisco Cerecedo. In May 2006, he was also given an honorary doctorate by the Universidad de Turín.
On 15 October 2007, he was presented with the Premio Planeta for his autobiographical novel El mundo, some memories of childhood, almost of adolescence, that tell the story of a boy who lives on the street and whose dream is to escape that street. On 3 December 2007, he was given an honorary doctorate by the Universidad de Oviedo, together with the Asturian poet Ángel González.
On 13 October 2008, Millás was given the Premio Nacional de Narrativa.
He received the 1974 Premio Sésamo for his short novel Cerbero son las sombras and the 1990 Premio Nadal for La soledad era esto.
He received the Premio Primavera de Novela in 2002 for his book Dos Mujeres en Praga (Two Women in Prague).
In 2007, he received the Premio Planeta for his novel "El Mundo". He has proved to be an introspective and sensitive writer.