Outlaws: Javier Cercas and Paul Preston

We cannot live all of our potential lives, Paul. Fiction is very useful for that. We can live in fiction what we have not lived in reality.

Listen to Javier Cercas and Paul Preston discuss history, imagination and the legacy of the Spanish civil war.

Javier Cercas rose to fame in the English-speaking world with The Soldiers of Salamis which won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2004 and was one of our early bestsellers. He continued his exploration of modern Spanish history with The Anatomy of a Moment, a work of non-fiction that investigated the failed coup of 1981. Now he returns to fiction with Outlaws, a fast-paced and morally complex tale of disaffected youth set in the period just after the end of the Franco dictatorship. Javier was joined in conversation by Paul Preston, Príncipe de Asturias Professor of Contemporary Spanish Studies at the LSE and author of The Spanish Holocaust.

Listen to this event below, or listen to a previous event with Javier Cercas and Paul Preston here. You can also read an extract from Outlaws here, or explore our selection of books about Francoism in Spain.