Who is Rodolfo Pérez Valero?

He is regarded as one of the founders of Cuban crime fiction. At the age of 26, he won First Prize in the Novel category of the National Crime Literature Contest with It's Not Time for Ceremonies, a national bestseller that was subsequently published in Buenos Aires, Puebla, Prague, Bratislava, Moscow, Sofia, and Kyiv. Renowned writer Paco Ignacio Taibo II has described him as “the great storyteller of the Latin American neo-noir novel.”

He is the only author to have won the First Prize of the Black Week of Gijón Short Story Contest on five occasions—in 1990, 1993, 1996, 2006, and 2009. These award-winning stories were later collected in A Man Knocks on the Door in the Rain, published by Random House in 2010.

At the age of 20, he underwent plastic surgery, and since 2001 he has changed his name twice. In a twist worthy of one of his own detective novels, he changed his face, country, and identity. Today, “Rodolfo Pérez Valero” exists only as his literary pseudonym.