Celebrated Spanish novelist and translator Javier Marias writes of the origins of his impulse to write, and the origins of his own family - and of the connection between these two different sorts of beginning. Exploring the difference between what is real in the world and what is true in fiction, he explains why an appeal to 'real events' has never convinced him; why the history of his own family, with its Cuban and Spanish strands, has left him uncertain what is legend and what is historically factual; and why what has been imagined can end up being truer than what 'really happened'.
