Joaquín Albaicín, born in 1965, founding member of the International Romani Writers Association (http://web.archive.org/web/20060222042648/www.romaniwriters.com/about.htm), is the best-known contemporary Romani author writing in Spanish. Besides writing fiction, he works as a journalist in Spain. Albaicín is descended from a well-known artistic family: his mother and great-aunt were celebrated flamenco dancers and his grandfather the famous torero Rafael Albaicín.

In his esoteric narrative works, Albaicín deals with mythology and traditional Romani culture. While the history of the origins of the Roma remains controversial in ethnological research to this day, Albaicín conducts a fictional investigation of that history in many of his works – by including various founding myths, such as in Gitanos en el ruedo: el Indostán en el toreo (1993), La serpiente terrenal (1993), En pos del sol. Los gitanos en la historia, el mito a la leyenda (1997) and in the collection of stories titled La Estrella de Plata (2000).

The oscillation between non-fiction and narrative, reality and fiction, is characteristic of his prose texts. It is exemplified in Diario de un paulista (Madrid: El Europeo & la Tripulación 1995), which is a kind of diary in which the life story of Albaicín’s grandfather is told in a documentary and fictional manner.

Works

Albaicín, Joaquín. 1993. Gitanos en el ruedo: el Indostán en el toreo. Madrid: Espasa Calpe.

Albaicín, Joaquín. 1993. La serpiente terrenal. Barcelona: Anagrama.

Albaicín, Joaquín. 1995. Diario de un paulista. Madrid: El Europeo & la Tripulación.

Albaicín, Joaquín. 1997. En pos del sol. Los gitanos en la historia, el mito a la leyenda. Barcelona: Obelisco.

Albaicín, Joaquín. 2000. La Estrella de Plata. Madrid: Sugerencia.