The celebrated Spanish novelist and translator Javier Marías writes of the origins of his impulse to write, of the origins of his own family, and of the connection between these two different sorts of beginning. Exploring the difference between what is true in the world and what is true in fiction, he explains why an appeal to ‘real events’ has never convinced him; why the history of his own family, with its Cuban and Spanish strands, has left him uncertain as to what is legend and what is historically factual; and why what has been imagined or dreamed can end up being truer than what ‘really happened’. The cahier includes a postface on translating Marías by his chief translator into English, Margaret Jull Costa, and images from the works of the renowned Cuban artist Wifredo Lam (1902 – 1982).

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