Leonardo Padura

Leonardo Padura (born in Havana in 1955) is a Cuban novelist, journalist and screenwriter. He is best known for his detective novels featuring the police lieutenant Mario Conde, and for his ambitious historical novel The Man Who Loved Dogs, which places him among the most important voices in contemporary Latin American fiction. He writes from inside Cuba, and his books reflect the tensions of Cuban society after 1959.

He studied Latin American literature at the University of Havana and began working as a journalist in 1980 at the literary magazine El Caimán Barbudo. His first novel, Horse Fever, is a love story written in the early 1980s. After years spent writing long cultural and historical features, he returned to fiction with Mario Conde, a cop who would rather have been a writer, a melancholy man whose story turns the detective novel into a critical mirror of Havana. Padura has acknowledged the influence of Hammett, Chandler, Vázquez Montalbán and Sciascia on how he approached the genre. Conde leaves the police in Autumn Landscape and later reappears dealing in secondhand books.

His work also includes essays on Alejo Carpentier and magical realism, screenplays, and novels such as The Man Who Loved Dogs, which reconstructs the assassination of Trotsky and the life of his killer, Ramón Mercader. His legacy lies in showing that a detective story can engage with the concrete reality of a country without giving up the pleasures of fiction. His books have been translated into several languages, and in 2015 he received the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature.