Susana Fortes
Susana Fortes (Pontevedra, Spain, 1959) graduated in Geography and History at the Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, and in American History from the Universidad de Barcelona. She has recently spent time in the USA, combining teaching Spanish in Louisiana and participating in university conferences at the Universidad Interestatal de San Francisco. She currently teaches at a secondary school in Valencia. With her first novel, Querido Corto Maltés (Dear Corto Maltés), she won the 1994 Premio Nuevos Narradores. In 2001 she was shortlisted in the Premio Primavera awarded by Espasa for her novel, Fronteras de arena (Borders of Sand). She has also published Las cenizas de la Bounty (Ashes of the Bounty; Espasa, 1998), Tiernos y traidores (Tender Traitors; Seix Barral, 1999) and the screenplay Adiós, muñeca (Ciao, Doll; Espasa, 2002). With her novel El amante albanés (The Albanian Affairs) she was short-listed for the Premio Planeta 2003. Her novels have been translated into English, Dutch, French, Norwegian, Greek, German, Italian, Portuguese (Portugal and Brazil), Chinese (Simplified and Complex) Polish, Hungarian, Croatian, Turkish, Hebrew, Russian and Korean. Susana is a regular contributor to the newspaper El País, as well as various cinema and literature magazines.
Her novel El azar de Laura Ulloa (The Fate of Laura Ulloa), Planeta 2006, won the Premio de la Crítica and has been translated into several languages. Quattroccento (Planeta, October 2007) and her last novel Waiting for Robert Capa (Planeta, 2009), winner of the Premio Fernando Lara 2009, have been translated into 12 languages and are best-seller in many countries.
Film rights of Waiting for Robert Capa have been sold to Forward Pass (Michael Mann's production company) and Columbia Pictures. The screenplay is written by Jez Butterworth.
“People beleived that the most devastating part of a war are the corpses with their guts out in the open, the puddles of blood, and all that you can capture at first glance. But sometimes the horror is off to the side, in the lost look on the face of a woman who's just been raped, as she limps away alone within the ruins, trying to keep her head down. Gerda and Capa were not aware of this yet. They were too young. And that was their first conflict. They still believed war had its romantic side.”