Esteban Navarro
b. 1965 · Spanish crime novelist and pioneer of digital self-publishing
Esteban Navarro Soriano (born in Moratalla, Murcia, in 1965) is a Spanish novelist who writes mainly in Spanish and also works in Catalan. He is best known for crime fiction and police novels, and his career matters because it shows how an author can reach a large readership without relying solely on traditional publishers.
For many years he combined writing with a job as an officer of Spain's National Police, which he held from 1994 to 2018. He has lived in Huesca since 2001, and the city appears in much of his fiction. There he organises literary events centred on crime writing. His output includes novels and short stories, and his stories have won a good number of awards. Among his titles, La casa de enfrente became one of the best-selling ebooks in Spanish, and El buen padre, set in Madrid, earned a prize in 2011 from a contest run by the José Saramago Foundation.
He is credited with coining the term Kindle Generation, which the media use for authors who publish and find readers through Kindle Direct Publishing, regardless of their age or style. His legacy lies largely in showing that digital self-publishing could work for Spanish-language writers. A History of Police, which depicts a mafia operating inside the police force itself, remains one of his most debated books.
Key works
- La casa de enfrente (The House Across the Street, 2011): a novel that became one of the best-selling ebooks and is often cited as a model of digital publishing.
- El buen padre (The Good Father, 2015): a novel set in Madrid that received a prize at the La Balsa de Piedra contest.
- El reactor de Bering (The Bering Reactor, 2016): a novel that had already won a short story contest in 2008.
- Una historia de policías (A History of Police, 2017): a novel about a mafia plot inside Spain's National Police, and the most controversial book of his career.
- La cuarta memoria (The Fourth Memory, 2022): a novella chosen as the best crime novel published in 2022 at the Lloret Negre festival.
Curiosities
The Kindle Generation
He is credited with coining this term, which groups together authors of very different ages and styles who publish through Kindle Direct Publishing.
A file over his novel
In 2017 the Directorate-General of the Police opened an information file on him over the publication of *A History of Police*, a story that reached international outlets such as The Guardian. The author said the file was not linked to that book.
Original Filopedia text based on Wikipedia (en) and Wikidata.