With a degree in Philosophy and Letters following in the footsteps of his father, the philosopher Julián Marías, for several years, he developed his teaching career as a professor of Spanish literature at Oxford University and Wellesley College (Massachusetts).
Javier Marías was one of the most intimate and personal voices of the Spanish narrative of his generation.
His characters are born from an intense complexity and are exposed to extraordinary and uncertain situations in everyday life.
There are many references to English literature, of which he was a great specialist and scholar, as well as a translator of great English works, a fact that earned him the National Translation Prize in 1979 for his versions of Laurence Sterne, one of the most complex authors of that language.
His first novel, Los dominios del lobo, was published in 1971. Set in the United States and written in a clearly journalistic style, it paid homage to the Hollywood cinema of the fifties and sixties, as well as to the great American novelists such as William Faulkner, Dashiell Hammet, Herman Melville and S. S. Van Dine.
It can be said that Javier Marías was one of the greatest exponents of the generation known as "los novísimos", a new aesthetic trend that placed its own cultural affiliation outside the Iberian sphere, having Spanish, practically the language.
The Madrid-born author's pen was rich in cultured syntactic constructions and an exquisite lexicon that drew directly from his knowledge of the Golden Age.
The stamp dedicated to the late writer reproduces a close-up portrait of Javier Marías, showing his intense gaze and half-smile, so characteristic of the author.
