Santiago Posteguillo (Valencia, 1967) won the Planeta Prize 2018 for his novel Yo, Julia. This is the most valuable literary award on the Spanish-language market (€601,000).
Yo, Julia is a historical novel based on the life of Julia Domna, one of the most relevant, fascinating, and unknown female characters in the history of Rome.
Wife and mother of emperors, Julia Domna (170-217), of Syrian origin, was an outsider who captivated all of Rome with her intelligence and beauty. In her struggle to protect her family and husband, Governor Septimius Severus (who she shrewdly turned into an emperor), Julia faced turbulent times. She lived in an era of political and economic instability, marked by a succession of five emperors in scarcely five years, including the cruel and unpredictable Emperor Commodus. Meanwhile, the great empire was threatened by a civil war capable of undermining its very foundations.
Santiago Posteguillo is the author of the highly successful Scipio and Trajan trilogies, with more than 1,500,000 copies sold in Spain and Latin America.
Posteguillo has also written three non-fiction books featuring short stories and anecdotes about writers and literature. He studied Creative Literature in the United States and Linguistics and Translation in England, and now combines his literary activities, and the historical research on which his novels are based, with his work as a professor of English Language and Literature at the Jaume I University in Castellón.
Posteguillo’s work has won several awards, including the International Barcino Historical Novel Prize. Other recipients of this award are the authors Simon Scarrow and Lindsey Davis.
His books have been translated into Czech, Italian, Polish, and Portuguese.