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VJ Books presents Javier Sierra! One of the outstanding authors on the Spanish literary scene, Javier Sierra was born in the northeastern Spanish town of Teruel in August 1971. From an early age he was fascinated by the world of communications, conducting his first radio program in Radio Heraldo at the age of twelve. By the time he was sixteen, he was writing articles for the press, and at eighteen he was one of the founders of an international magazine. Sierra studied journalism at the Complutense University of Madrid, and published his first book in 1995. He is the author of three books of nonfiction concerning historical and scientific enigmas, as well as four successful novels.
His first literary undertaking, The Lady in Blue (1998), describes in detail the trances and bilocation of a nun from Soria, María Jesús of Ágreda (1602-1665), which Sierra attributes to her listening to certain types of sacred music and prayers of a very specific musical cadence, which provoked this mystical state in the mind of this “servant of God.” This first novel was the beginning of Sierra's vocation to use literature as a vehicle to solve some of the great mysteries of the past. The author meticulously researches these mysteries, thereby heightening their enigma, in his quest to arrive at a probable solution to the questions they pose.
The success of The Lady in Blue was soon followed by other novels dealing with historical enigmas: The Templar Doors (2000), Napoleon’s Egyptian Secret (2002) and The Secret Supper (2004), which was the finalist of the prestigious novel prize Ciudad de Torrevieja and consequently made an immediate appearance on the bestseller lists of Spain and Latin America. Sierra’s books have been translated into twenty five languages, demonstrating that his passion for the mysteries of the past is something universal.
Sierra has visited more than twenty countries, probing their mysteries. Egypt is the country he is most familiar with, having traveled there on many occasions since 1995. During his research in Turkey, he sought (and found) the controversial map of Piri Reis, a document offering definitive proof that Christopher Columbus arrived in America thanks to previous navigational charts made prior to 1492, which already reflected the New World in their routes. Another of Sierra’s frequent destinations is Peru, where he participated in archaeological digs to find the lost Incan gold that Atahualpa hid when Pizarro arrived in Cuzco. According to Sierra, this sacred gold lies buried in an undergroundnetwork of passageways whose ingenious engineering surpassed that of the Andean priests of the sixteenth century.
Javier Sierra lives in Málaga on the Costa del Sol, where he currently has seven more books in the works. His primary aspiration is to devote himself entirely to his two no longer secret passions: traveling and writing.
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