Ana Merino

Ana Merino (Madrid, 1971) is an award-winning writer and The Director of the Cátedra Planeta of Literature and Society at the University International of Valencia in Spain, is a Full Professor of Spanish Creative Writer and a Collegiate Scholar at the University of Iowa. Winner of the 2020 Nadal Award for her novel “El mapa de los afectos”, she also published the novel “Amigo”. In 2011 she creates the Spanish MFA program at the University of Iowa and was its director until December 2018. She has published ten books of poems, two of which, “Preparativos para un viaje” and “Juegos de niños”,won the Adonais Prize in 1994 and the Fray Luis de León Prize in 2003. She is also author of two youth novels, “El hombre de los dos corazones” (2009) and “Planeta Lasvi” (2024), a children album, and four plays, including “Amor muy frágil” (2013), which was staged in several Swiss theaters in 2012 and 2013 and “La Redención” at Iowa City in 2017. Merino has won the Diario de Avisos prize for her short articles on comics for the literary magazine Leer. She had collaborated with opinion articles for El País and has won an Accésit of the Carmen de Burgos Award for one of her journalistic pieces. Merino has also written extensive criticism on comics and graphic novels. She has two academic books El cómic hispánico (2003) and Diez ensayos para pensar el cómic (2017), a monograph on Chris Ware (2006) and the catalogue Fantagraphics creadores del canon (2003). She has curated six exhibitions on comics. She has been invited as visiting Professor to Dartmouth College (Summer 2023), the University of Zurich (Spring 2019) and the University of San Gallen (Fall 2012).