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José Latour was born in Havana, Cuba, on April 24, 1940. He started reading at a very tender age and progressed from Hans Christian Andersen and the Grimm brothers as a child, to Raymond Chandler and Erle Stanley Gardner in his late teens. His first trip abroad took place in 1954, to the United States; he visited Canada in 1956.
José became an ardent revolutionary and, after completing secondary education, joined the Ministry of Treasury as a junior financial analyst and translator in 1960. Earning a B.A. in Finance seemed a waste of time, as the ministry was dissolved in 1965. He first transferred to the Cuban Central Bank, then to the Ministry of Sugar and, when in 1977 the government grasped that all countries need offices to prepare and oversee budgets, he swelled the ranks of the State Committee of Finance.
However, shuffling papers and becoming a career bureaucrat was not challenging enough and in 1977 José started writing crime fiction in his spare time. His first three novels (Preludio a la Noche, Medianoche Enemiga and Fauna Noctura), set in pre-revolutionary Havana, were published by Editorial Letras Cubanas in 1982, 1986 and 1989. The fourth (Choque de Leyendas), was launched in 1998, nine years after he first delivered the manuscript to the publisher.
José joined the Union of Cuban Writers and Artists, and the International Association of Crime Writers (AIEP) in1988. Two years later, he resigned his position as global financial analyst in the Ministry of Finance to become a full-time writer. In 1998 he was elected vice-president for Latin America of the International Association of Crime Writers.
In 1994 José delivered to his publisher The Fool, a novel based on a real-life case of corruption in the ministries of the Interior and the Armed Forces that was uncovered in 1989. This book was considered counterrevolutionary by… yes, of course, the Ministry of the Interior, and its author labeled an “enemy of the people.” Certain that neither The Fool nor the books he wanted to write would get published in Cuba as long as all publishing houses were state-owned, rejecting ideological subservience and adamant about pursuing a career as a novelist, José took a shot at writing in English.
His first novel in that language, Outcast, published in the U.S., Japan, five Western European countries and Brazil, got flattering reviews and was nominated for an Edgar. Since, he has penned Havana Best Friends (2002), Havana World Series (2003), Comrades in Miami (2005) and The Young Englishman (2006, still unpublished). His sole non-fiction book is Postcommunist CUBA Poscomunista, a bilingual essay.
Seeking creative fiction and fearing dictatorial repression, the author and his family moved to Spain in August 2002 and to Canada in September 2004. Currently he is researching his next novel, due in 2008.
LINKS
To access the International Association of Crime Writers website:
To read a recent Globe & Mail interview (requires purchase):
To listen to Latour reading a fragment from Havana Best Friends:
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To access his Canadian publisher's website:
To listen to an interview with Latour by McClelland & Stewart's Executive Editor, Dinah Forbes:
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