Bernardo Atxaga (Joseba Irazu Garmendia, b. 1951) is an award-winning Basque writer, whose work spans adult and children's prose, poetry, radio, cinema and theatre, as well as short stories. He first achieved national and international fame with Obabakoak (1988), which won the National Literature Prize 1989 and has been translated into more than twenty languages. His novels have won critical acclaim in Spain and abroad; most recently, Margaret Jull Costa's translation of Seven Houses in France was shortlisted for the 2012 Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize.
