Javier Fuentes

Javier Fuentes is a Spanish American writer born in Barcelona. He studied for an MFA in fiction at Columbia University, where he also taught, and was a 2018 Lambda Literary Fellow. He has since been named the inaugural Paris Review Visiting Professor of Literature at the Bard Prison Initiative.

His fiction is about leaving and returning, and about what money and papers do to desire. Countries of Origin opens with a line he has said was the first he wrote: the narrator grew up loving a country that did not love him back. The book keeps that tone throughout, calm and observant, with long walks, bars and beaches doing much of the emotional work. Place matters to him. One interviewer noted how he sets a pricey, changing New York against a slower, less polished Madrid.

Countries of Origin, published by Pantheon in 2023 and in paperback from Vintage in 2025, is his first book. Demetrio, an undocumented pastry chef in New York, is made to go back to Spain, the country of his birth, where he has no family left. On the flight to Madrid he meets Jacobo, a wealthy university student from the city still working out his sexuality. Their relationship tests the gap in class and circumstance between them. The novel won the 2024 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel.

Start there. It is his first book, the one that brought him the prize, and it works as a slow, close love story and as a novel about immigration at once.