Enrique Vila-Matas was for years an editor and contributor to the magazines Fotogramas, Destino and Boccacio. He currently writes weekly for the newspaper El País.

His extensive work includes A Brief History of Portable Literature; Suicidios ejemplares (Spanish for Model Suicides); Hijos sin hijos (Spanish for Sons without Sons); Bartleby & Co.; Montano’s Malady; Doctor Pasavento; Never Any End to Paris; Exploradores del abismo (Spanish for Explorers of the Abyss); Dietario voluble (Spanish for Voluble Diary); Dublinesque; Aire de Dylan (Spanish for Air of Dylan); The Illogic of Kassel; Mac and his problem; Esta bruma insensata (Spanish for This Senseless Mist); and Montevideo.

His books of literary essays include Desde la ciudad nerviosa (Spanish for From the anxious city); El viento ligero en Parma (Spanish for Light Wind in Parma); Una vida absolutamente maravillosa (Spanish for An absolutely wonderful life); Perder teorías (Spanish for Losing theories); El viajero más lento (Spanish for The slowest traveler); and Impón tu suerte (Spanish for Set your fate).

Translated into 36 languages, Vila-Matas has created over time a highly personal style that some critics have described as unclassifiable, "if it were not for the fact that even that classification is too small for him", "aversion to the stalest forms of the novelistic tradition", "travels back and forth between life and literature", "disdain for the psychologism of realist narrative" and a "distinguished flâneur attitude" combined with an "undaunted humour". All these elements are masterfully combined in his latest novel, Montevideo.

Winner of numerous prizes such as the Formentor de las Letras, the Médicis-Étranger, the National Culture Prize of Catalonia, the Ciutat de Barcelona, the Herralde Novel Prize, the Royal Spanish Academy Prize, the Chilean Critics' Circle Prize, the Meilleur Livre Étranger, the Elsa Morante Prize, the Mondello Prize, and the Gregor von Rezzori Prize... Enrique Vila-Matas is a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honour, and in his authorised biography one can read that he belongs to the convulsive Order of the Knights of the Finnegans, or that he is a prominent member of the Society of Refractories to General Imbecility (based in Nantes).