MADRID — Carlos Ruiz Zafón, whose mystery novel “The Shadow of the Wind” became one of the best-selling Spanish books of all time, died on Friday at his home in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 55.
His death was announced by his Spanish publishing house, Planeta. His literary agent, Antonia Kerrigan, said the cause was colon cancer, which he had been battling for two years.
Published in 2001, “The Shadow of the Wind” was translated into dozens of languages and has sold more than 15 million copies worldwide. It was the second-most-successful Spanish novel after Miguel de Cervantes’s masterpiece “Don Quixote,” according to Planeta.
A visit to a book warehouse in Los Angeles, where he moved in the 1990s, inspired Mr. Ruiz Zafón to write “The Shadow of the Wind,” but he set the action in his birthplace, Barcelona. Written as a story within a story, the novel crisscrosses the tumultuous decades before, during and after the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s.
His death was announced by his Spanish publishing house, Planeta. His literary agent, Antonia Kerrigan, said the cause was colon cancer, which he had been battling for two years.
Published in 2001, “The Shadow of the Wind” was translated into dozens of languages and has sold more than 15 million copies worldwide. It was the second-most-successful Spanish novel after Miguel de Cervantes’s masterpiece “Don Quixote,” according to Planeta.
A visit to a book warehouse in Los Angeles, where he moved in the 1990s, inspired Mr. Ruiz Zafón to write “The Shadow of the Wind,” but he set the action in his birthplace, Barcelona. Written as a story within a story, the novel crisscrosses the tumultuous decades before, during and after the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s.
