Biography
Marcos Calveiro has published numerous works of fiction, as well as a poetry collection and a study of the Galician poet Lois Pereiro. His books for young people include The Painter with the Hat of Mallows (2010) about the friendship between a troubled teenager and the painter Vincent van Gogh and Words of Water (2012) about a tribe on the move in Africa and a young boy’s race to grow up. The former has appeared in English; the latter was included in the 2014 IBBY List. His adult novels include Festina Lente (2008), about the time of the Inquisition in Galicia; Fontán (2015) about the nineteenth-century figure Domingo Fontán; and Gardener for the English (2017), which won the prestigious García Barros Award for long novels. The author is a practising lawyer and runs a café – the Badía – in Vigo.
Synopsis
Gardener for the English (444 pages) is Marcos Calveiro’s most recent novel and merited two of Galicia’s most prestigious literary awards, the García Barros for long novels and the San Clemente.
Sample
The important thing is not what you tell, but the way you do it, I always used to say. And that was why I was about to jump over the wall and to desecrate that old cemetery almost everybody had forgotten. Who ever would have said I would end up like this, as a common grave robber? And all because of the nonsense that had got inside my head, that itching sensation that hadn’t left me for an age.
It was a few minutes after seven in the morning, and dawn was just showing itself behind Mount Lobeira, which was stripped of its trees and with its immodest rocks in plain view after so many summers of deliberately started fires. With the dawn, the large iron cross affixed to its summit blazed brightly. Seeing it, I remembered that other cross – the one that is always drawn on pirates’ faded treasure maps in novels and films. It seemed my incessant search lasting all these years was about to end here. I had found it. Finally, I had the chest of gold and jewels within reach. I was a satisfied pirate. A few steps more, and it would be mine. I had succeeded. At last.
Portico of Galician Literature 