Jason Webster is an Anglo-American author who writes on Spain. He was born in California to British parents in 1970. He has spent most of his adult life in Spain, having settled in Valencia with his Spanish wife, actress and dancer Salud Botella.[1][2] He is a director of The Scheherazade Foundation.
Webster is the author of fifteen books on Spain and Spanish themes, ranging from travel to history, biography, detective fiction, essay, short story and poetry. He has appeared in several television documentaries and his works have been translated into a dozen languages.
Books
Duende: A journey in search of Flamenco (2003), which recounts Webster's move to Spain after university and his quest to learn flamenco guitar and the path to the elusive yet passionate feeling of duende, an untranslatable term referring to the feeling that is the essence of flamenco.[3] It was long-listed for the Guardian First Book Award[4] and read on BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week.[5]
Andalus: Unlocking the secrets of Moorish Spain (2004, Doubleday, ISBN0-385-60507-2) examines the deep impact left on Spain – and by extension the rest of Europe – by the Moorish presence and was adapted as a radio play by the BBC.[6]
Guerra: Living in the shadows of the Spanish Civil War (2006, Black Swan, ISBN0-385-60854-3), studied the wounds left by the civil war on contemporary Spain through a combination of history and travel. A Spanish edition, Las heridas abiertas de la guerra civil, was published in 2008 with a prologue by Paul Preston of the London School of Economics
Sacred Sierra: A year on a Spanish mountain (2009, Chatto & Windus, ISBN0-7011-8157-5) describes a year that Webster and his Spanish wife spent living on their mountain farm in eastern Spain, on the slopes of the sacred peak of Penyagolosa, working on the land and planting trees with the help of a 12th-century Moorish gardening manual. It paints a portrait of a little-known part of the country, with details of its folklore, history and customs, and with meditations on stories, the need to preserve them and their importance for communities. Webster made a short promotional film for the book in conjunction with the award-winning Swedish film director David Flamholc of Caravan Film.
Blood Med (2014, Chatto & Windus, ISBN0-7011-8691-7), is the fourth Chief Inspector Max Cámara crime novel, focussing on the political and social problems of contemporary Spain.
A Body in Barcelona (2015, Chatto & Windus, [ISBNmissing]), is the fifth Chief Inspector Max Cámara novel, set mostly in Barcelona against a backdrop of attempts by Catalan activists to declare independence from Spain. The novel anticipated by two years similar moves in real life by Catalan politicians, who held a controversial referendum on independence in October 2017.
Fatal Sunset (2017, Chatto & Windus, [ISBNmissing]), is the sixth Chief Inspector Max Cámara novel, set mostly in and around the city of Valencia.
Violencia: A New History of Spain (2019, Constable, ISBN1-4721-2985-7), published in the US as Why Spain Matters: A History of the Land that Shaped the Western World (Corsario, ISBN978-1-913955-04-5).
The World of Max Cámara (2020, Corsario, ISBN978-1-913955-00-7), Volume I of Webster's Mosaics of Spain series, is a collection of essays, articles, photos, interviews and a short story focussing on the author's fictional police detective and the city of Valencia, where he lives and works.
The Art of Flamenco (2020, Corsario, ISBN978-1-913955-02-1), Volume II of the Mosaics of Spain series, is a collection of articles, essays and photos focussing on flamenco.
The Book of Duende (2022, Corsario, ISBN978-1-913955-09-0) is an in-depth examination of what Webster describes as 'the magical and often mysterious force at the heart of flamenco', containing aphorisms, essays, proverbs, stories and poetry.
He has appeared in several British TV documentaries, including An Islamic History of Europe,[8] presented by Rageh Omaar on BBC television and the critically acclaimed Andalusia: The Legacy of the Moors for Five.
In April 2013 he presented "Flashmob Flamenco", a documentary for BBC Radio 4 on the response within the Flamenco community to the economic crisis in Spain.[9]
Paella is a rice dish originally from Valencia. While it is commonly viewed by non-Spaniards as Spain's national dish, Spaniards almost unanimously consider it to be a dish from the Valencian region. Valencians, in turn, regard paella as one of their identifying symbols. It is one of the best-known dishes in Spanish cuisine.
Ruth Barbara Rendell, Baroness Rendell of Babergh, was an English author of thrillers and psychological murder mysteries.
The Music of Andalusia encompasses a range of traditional and modern musical genres which originate in the territory of Andalusia in southern Spain. The most famous are copla and flamenco, the latter being sometimes used as a portmanteau term for various regional musical traditions within Andalusia. Today, Andalusia has a rich and thriving musical scene, which draws from its own musical traditions as well as from external influences such as salsa, jazz or pop music.
Herbert Richard Hoggart was a British academic whose career covered the fields of sociology, English literature and cultural studies, with emphasis on British popular culture.
Philip Ballantyne Kerr was a British author, best known for his Bernie Gunther series of historical detective thrillers.
Henry Reymond Fitzwalter Keating was an English crime fiction writer most notable for his series of novels featuring Inspector Ghote of the Bombay CID.
Joan Alison Smith is an English journalist, novelist, and human rights activist, who is a former chair of the Writers in Prison committee in the English section of International PEN and was the Executive Director of Hacked Off.
Malise Walter Maitland Knox Hore-Ruthven is an Anglo-Irish academic and writer.
Peter (Harmer) Lovesey, also known by his pen name Peter Lear, is a British writer of historical and contemporary detective novels and short stories. His best-known series characters are Sergeant Cribb, a Victorian-era police detective based in London, and Peter Diamond, a modern-day police detective in Bath.
P. J. Kavanagh FRSL was an English poet, lecturer, actor, broadcaster and columnist. His father was the ITMA scriptwriter Ted Kavanagh.
Guillaume Bélibaste is said to have been the last Cathar parfait in Languedoc. He was burned at the stake in 1321, as a result of the Inquisition at Pamiers led by Jacques Fournier. Much of Bélibaste's biography can be found in the pages of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's Montaillou; although Bélibaste never lived at Montaillou, he is frequently mentioned in the interrogations of suspected heretics from Montaillou.
Ann Cleeves is a British mystery crime writer. She wrote the Vera Stanhope, Jimmy Perez, and Matthew Venn series, all three of which have been adapted into TV shows. In 2006 she won the Duncan Lawrie Dagger for her novel Raven Black, the first novel in the Jimmy Perez series.
Siân Rees is a British author and historian. She was born in Cornwall, has a degree in history from University of Oxford and lives in France. She is particularly interested in the social and maritime history of the 17th and 18th centuries. Her first book, about the transportation of female convicts to Australia at the end of the 18th century, was made into a Timewatch documentary and has been optioned as a feature film. The second, a biography of Eliza Lynch, led to her involvement in the Argentine documentary Candido Lopez: Los Campos de Batalla, directed by José Luis García.
Edward Grierson was a Northumberland barrister and a writer of crime novels. His debut crime novel is the outstanding Reputation for a Song, a classic inverted detective story. Grierson also wrote five novels, six works of non-fiction and two plays. He also wrote as Brian Crowther and John P. Stevenson.
The False Inspector Dew is a humorous crime novel by Peter Lovesey. It won the Gold Dagger award by the Crime Writers' Association in 1982 and has featured on many "Best of" lists since.
Artists in Crime is a detective novel by Ngaio Marsh; it is the sixth novel to feature Roderick Alleyn, and was first published in 1938. The plot concerns the murder of an artists' model; Alleyn's love interest Agatha Troy is introduced.
Scales of Justice is a detective novel by Ngaio Marsh. it is the eighteenth novel to feature Roderick Alleyn, and was first published in 1955. With a classic 'Golden Age' crime novel's setting, in the idyllic, self-contained, rural English community of Swevenings, the suspects all members of a tight-knit social group revolving around the local baronet and his family, the plot concerns the brutal murder of Colonel Carterette, an enthusiastic fisherman, who is preparing for publication the deceased squire's memoirs, which include the admission that as a high-ranking diplomat before World War Two, the baronet had treasonably put class before country in what has been called the Herrenvolk heresy, and knowingly let a young member of the embassy staff take the blame. The young man in question, who idolised the Lacklander ambassador, had committed suicide and his eccentric father is now the murdered colonel's neighbour.
Nicholas Davies is an award-winning British investigative journalist, writer, and documentary maker.
The Beacon, is a novel by English author Susan Hill, first published in 2008 by Chatto and Windus and in paperback the following year by Vintage Books.
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