In the attic of his house in Illescas, in the La Sagra region, Lorenzo Silva writes his novels in complete silence. Every day he drives there from Getafe to get away from the noise of the city. It is the place that inspires him, where he can find peace and concentration. He does not need a large window with a view of the sea like Pablo Neruda's in Valparaíso. It is enough for him to be surrounded by books that, like in prisons, become authentic spiritual windows. "I have donated books to libraries, schools, prisons... And I have not met people for whom reading means more than for people deprived of liberty," he says, sitting at his desk. Lorenzo Silva keeps a very well-preserved, yellow Erika made in Germany. His mother used this typewriter to type the first stories he wrote as a child. She passed away this summer and it is still difficult for him to talk about her, but Paquita Amador played a crucial role in awakening his literary vocation. Without her, he probably would not be where he is today. His mother also accompanied him to the newsstand to get his first comics, bought him Don Quixote for school and taught him the two most basic and essential tools for a writer. “To look and listen,” he explains excitedly. “My first typewritten works are not mine, but yours. My writing, my way of reading the world, to a large extent, too,” he wrote in June in a letter entitled Thank you, Mom. A small sculpture of Don Quixote and Rocinante stands out against the dull shine of a tricorn hat. Family photos coexist with perfectly framed black and white portraits of his reference writers. Authors he always returns to: Kafka, Stendhal, Jane Austen, Walter Benjamin, Virginia Woolf, Raymond Chandler… Without the mark left on him by the latter, he admits, “I would never have written a detective novel.” And perhaps, he would not have dared to leave his job as a lawyer in a large company to devote himself entirely to literature. In a week, Lorenzo Silva will publish La llama de Focea. His thirteenth novel about the civil guards Bevilacqua and Chamorro, in which through these two mythical and beloved characters he portrays how we have changed in Spain in the last twenty years. “Thanks to books, I have spent my whole life travelling around the planet and through all the eras through which one can travel,” Lorenzo Silva sums up. Why is Raymond Chandler one of his great teachers? What novel is much more useful for learning to write stories than Netflix series? Who is the philosopher you admire and who wrote the best biography of Kafka? We talk about these and other questions in this interview in En la biblioteca de, a section in which we have also discovered the personal library of novelists such as Arturo Pérez-Reverte or Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa. Subscribe to our channel: http://cort.as/yI0n Visit http://elpais.com More videos from EL PAÍS: http://cort.as/YGC9 Follow us on Facebook: / elpais Twitter: / el_pais Instagram: / el_pais #EnLaBiblitoecaDe #Literature #Books #Culture #Reading #Writers #IntheLibrary #Booksellers #Libraries #LorenzoSilva