José Manuel Fajardo

José Manuel Fajardo, born in Granada, Spain, in 1957, was educated in Madrid, lived in the Basque Country and Paris, and has resided in Lisbon since 2010. He is a writer, journalist, translator, and cultural manager. He is the author of the Sephardic Triptych trilogy (comprising the novels Letter from the End of the World, The Convert, and My Name is Jamaica) and the novels A Convulsive Beauty, Just What You Want, and Hate. He is also the author of the historical essays The Epic of the Madmen, The Ships of Time, and Exaggerated Lives, the short story collection Ways of Being, and the book of journalistic chronicles The Years of Fear: Chronicle of Violence (1990-2015). He is the co-author, with Antonio Sarabia and José Ovejero, of the novel First News of Noela Duarte. And in collaboration with photographer Daniel Mordzinski, he published the travel book The Path of the Moriscos. In 2025, he received the Jaén Poetry Prize for his poetry collection Perfecta sombra (Perfect Shadow). As a journalist, he has won the King of Spain International Journalism Prize. As a novelist, he has received the Charles Brisset Literary Prize and the Alberto-Benveniste Prize for best literary work on Sephardic culture in France, and the Espartaco Prize for best historical novel in Spain. His work has been translated into French, Italian, German, Portuguese, Greek, Romanian, and Serbian. As a cultural manager, he co-founded the Puerto Rico Word Festival in 2010 with Puerto Rican writer Mayra Santos Febres, and he curated its programming until 2017. He collaborates with the Maison des Écrivains Étrangers et des Traducteurs (MEET) in Saint-Nazaire, France, and with the programming of the Santo Domingo International Book Fair in the Dominican Republic. He has been the commissioner of the Benengeli festival of the Cervantes Institute of Spain in 2024 and 2025. Since 2022, he has been responsible for the programming of the International Writers’ Congress in Caguas, Puerto Rico.

Una belleza convulsa
Barcelona, 2001

Mi nombre es Jamaica
Barcelona, 2010

El Converso
Barcelona, 2012

Carta Del Fin Del Mundo
Barcelona, 2013

Odio
Madrid, 2022