Photo by James Salzano

Rafael Yglesias

Rafael Yglesias is an American novelist and screenwriter. His parents were the writers Jose Yglesias and Helen Yglesias. They raised him to share in their almost religious faith that the only hope for the novel continuing to be a vital art form was for the values of 19th century realism to be applied to today’s fiction. Over his forty year career their influence has evolved into Rafael striving for an intensely evocative psychological realism, to have the reader experience what his characters feel and think with as little emotional distance, playful irony or summarizing self-righteousness as possible. He has two sons of whom he is unashamedly proud: blogger, author and public intellectual Matthew Yglesias, a Fellow at the Center for American Progress; and Nicholas Yglesias, a science fiction and fantasy novelist. He was married to their mother, Margaret, from 1977 until her death from bladder cancer in 2004.

Yglesias was born (May 12, 1954) and raised in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood. He dropped out of high school to finish his first novel, Hide Fox, And All After, which was published in 1972. After writing three novels by the age of twenty-one, Rafael stopped writing books between 1976 and 1984 and concentrated on starting a family. He made a living by writing screenplays.

He returned to novels in the mid-1980s. Hot Properties was published in 1986, Only Children in 1988, The Murderer Next Door in 1990, Fearless in 1993, and Dr. Neruda’s Cure For Evil in 1996. In 1992 he resumed writing screenplays. The first to be produced, Fearless, was an adaptation of his novel of the same title. Other produced films that followed were adaptations of works by Ariel Dorfman, Victor Hugo, and Alan Moore; the most recent was a remake of a Japanese horror movie. They were directed by Peter Weir, Roman Polanski, Bille August, the Hughes Brothers, and Walter Salles.

After the publication of Dr. Neruda’s Cure For Evil, Yglesias took another break from writing novels, partly due to grief over the loss of his father in 1995, who had been both a nagging and inspiring presence, but mostly because of the illness and death of his wife. A Happy Marriage is his first novel after a thirteen year hiatus. It was awarded the 2009 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction.