The author established himself with the celebrated, Libreter-award-winning Mentira (Lie), which Francis Ford Coppola praised and discussed bringing to the screen.

Some jobs merge into one’s life, asserts his former editor at Edhasa, Daniel Fernández. And that’s what always made Enrique de Hériz – writer, translator and editor – tenacious, dedicated and brilliant at all of it. In addition to being the author of novels like Mentira, he brought a Spanish voice to the works of writers like Jonathan Franzen and Daniel Defoe, and spent almost two decades of turning the first literary dreams of Nuria Barrios and Olga Merino into books. “He understood that life is a constant cycle of editing and rewriting,” said Fernández. And that is how he lived, until yesterday, when an aggressive lung cancer cut that partnership short at 55 years of age, in Barcelona.

Just four great novels defined De Hériz’s (Barcelona, 1964) writing career, and it was common to encounter among his characters someone who had dropped everything and resolutely pursued their true passion. That’s exactly what he did. After 19 years as an editor – mainly at Ediciones B, then known as Grupo Z, where he also worked as literary director for six years – he got his degree in philology (naturally) and left it all behind to become a writer.

Read more here: El País