Leonardo Padura Fuentes

Padura has published two subsequent books featuring Conde, the novella Adiós Hemingway (Padura’s first book to be translated into English, in 2005), and a recent novel La neblina del ayer (The Fog of Yesterday, published in English as Havana Fever). The Havana-Cultura website comments on the similarities and differences between Padura and Hemingway, and how they might explain Pdura's decision to feature the expatriate American in Adiós Hemingway.

"How to Write from Mantilla, or the Small Heresies of Leonardo Padura," chapter 5 in Yvon Grenier, Culture and the Cuban State, Participation, Recognition, and Dissonance under Communism (Lexington Books, 2017).

In 2013, France named him a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Padura's historical novel El hombre que amaba a los perros (The Man Who Loved Dogs) deals with the murder of Leon Trotsky and the man who assassinated him, Ramon Mercader. At almost 600 pages, it is his most accomplished work and the result of more than five years of meticulous historical research. The novel, published in September 2009, attracted a lot of publicity mainly because of its political theme. The novel centres "on Stalin’s murderous obsession with Leon Trotsky, an intellectual architect of the Russian Revolution and the founder of the Red Army", and considers "how revolutionary utopias devolve into totalitarian dystopias."

Paisaje de otoño won the 1998 Premio Hammett of the Asociación Internacional de Escritores Policiacos (International Association of Crime Writers). This prize should not be confused with the similarly named Hammett Prize given by the North American branch of the organization, which is restricted to United States and Canadian authors.

He wrote his first short novel between 1983 and 1984. Titled Fiebre de caballos (Horse Fever), it was basically a love story. During the next six years, he continued to work as a journalist, reporting on a wide range of cultural and historical topics. However, around this time he began to write his first novel featuring police officer Mario Conde. While he was writing it, Padura realised how fundamental his years as a journalist were to his development as a writer. Firstly it gave him a whole new experience of the country, and secondly, it changed his style with respect to his first book.

Padura, who was born in Havana, took a degree in Latin American literature at the University of Havana. In 1980 he first came to prominence as an investigative journalist in a literary magazine called Caimán Barbudo, a well-established publication that is still published today. He became known as an essayist and a writer of screenplays and in particular, detective novels.

Leonardo de la Caridad Padura Fuentes (born October 10, 1955) is a Cuban novelist and journalist. As of 2007, he is one of Cuba's best-known writers internationally. In his native Spanish, as well as in English and some other languages, he is often referred to by the shorter form of his name, Leonardo Padura. He has written screenplays, two books of short stories, and a series of detective novels translated into 10 languages. In 2012, Padura was awarded the National Prize for Literature, Cuba's national literary award and the most important award of its kind. In 2015, he was awarded the Premio Principe de Asturias de las Letras of Spain, one of the most important literary prizes in the Spanish-speaking world and usually considered as the Iberoamerican Nobel Prize.