It’s a few months since we’ve given a new podcast but we’re delighted to break the silence with a conversation with Margaret Jull Costa, the distinguished translator from Spanish and Portuguese, about the Spanish writer Javier Marías.

Javier was a client at John Sandoe’s from the mid-1990s, soon after his work first started appearing in English with the Harvill Press. Although he rarely came to the UK, we continued to send him books in Madrid regularly until his death last year. His work is deeply engaged with England, MI6, Oxford, detective stories, and the mysteries of interpretation and translation. His last work to be published (in March this year) is Tomás Nevinson, which is a sequel to Berta Isla. These two extraordinary books have many of the same preoccupations as his trilogy, Your Face Tomorrow – which I described in the Spectator as a work of genius when I reviewed it. But the best place to start reading him is probably his first novel to be published in the UK, All Souls.

Interviewed by Johnny de Falbe 

Edited by Magnus Rena

Cover photograph by Marzena Pogorzaly

Music: Chubby Checker, Hucklebuck