ENGLISH CORNER, CON LINDA JIMÉNEZ – This week’s trivia question: Who were the three peoples living in Judea at the time of Jesus, and was the position of women in each of them?

Richard Zimler is a best-selling novelist who specializes in historical fiction, generally with Jewish themes. He was born in New York, in 1956. He earned a bachelor’s degree in comparative religion from Duke University and a master’s degree in journalism from Stanford University, and then worked for eight years as a journalist, mainly in the San Francisco Bay area. In 1990, he moved to Porto, Portugal, where he taught journalism for sixteen years, first at the College of Journalism and later at the University of Porto.

Richard has published eleven novels over the last 22 years, and his works have been translated into 23 languages.

His novels have appeared on bestseller lists in 12 different countries, including the USA, Great Britain, Portugal, Italy, Brazil and Australia. Five of his books have been nominated for the prestigious International Dublin Literary Award.

Richard has won numerous awards for his work, including the Marquis de Ouro prize in 2010 – as Book of the Year in Portugal – for The Warsaw Anagrams; the 2009 Alberto Benveniste prize in fiction for Guardian of the Dawn (for best Jewish-themed novel published in France), and the 1998 Herodotus Award, for The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon (Best Historical Novel). He was also granted a 1994 U.S. National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in Fiction. In 2017, the city of Porto awarded Zimler its highest distinction, the Medal of Honor.

Richard has also published five children’s books in Portugal. One of them, The Dog Who Ate Raindrops won the prize for Best Children’s Book of 2018 from the Bissaya Barreto Foundation of Portugal. He writes his children’s books in Portuguese and his novels in English.

The Guardian recently published an article by Zimler, Top 10 Novels about Pariahs, which you can read  here. 

His latest novel, The Gospel According to Lazarus, was published in the UK, Ireland, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand in April and will come out in America and Canada in July.