Manolo Palomares

Manolo Palomares is a Spanish author of historical fiction, born in Valencia in 1974 and now resident in Mexico. His novels are principally concerned with the Spanish conquest and settlement of Mexico, examining the encounters, alliances and violence that created colonial New Spain. Rather than presenting conquest solely through celebrated commanders, his fiction often follows people caught between Spanish and Indigenous societies and explores the competing identities produced by cultural conflict.

His books include Hernán Cortés: Noches tristes, días de gloria, a novel about the conquest and fall of the Aztec Empire, and Mestizo, which follows Martín Cortés, the son of Hernán Cortés and Malinche. Morirás en Despoblado centres on the mestizo captain Miguel Caldera during the Chichimeca War and the struggle to secure the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro. Palomares has also turned to Greek mythology in La última noche de Troya, retelling Odysseus’s stratagem of the Trojan Horse. His fiction combines military conflict and political change with questions of ancestry, cultural division and survival in societies transformed by conquest.