Jacobo Siruela

Jacobo was born on July 15, 1954, in Madrid, Spain, in the bosom of the House of Alba, one of the most important and traditional families of the Spanish aristocracy. He was the third son of the 18th Duchess of Alba de TormesCayetana Fitz-James Stuart and Luis Martínez de Irujo y Artázcoz, a son of the Dukes of Sotomayor and Marquises of Casa Irujo.

Like his older brother, Carlos Fitz-James Stuart y Martínez de Irujo, 19th Duke of Alba de Tormes and current head of the House of Alba, he inverted the order of his surnames, so his surnames are Fitz-James Stuart y Martínez de Irujo instead of Martínez de Irujo y Fitz-James Stuart.

In 1980, his mother granted him the title of Count of Siruela, GE, which dates back to 1470. In any case, as he belonged to the Republic of Letters, he always signed, apart from his complicated surnames, simply: Jacobo Siruela.

On November 1, 1980, he married María Eugenia Fernández de Castro y Fernández-Shaw in the Liria Palace, from whom he separated after ten years. From this union he had two children: Jacobo and Brianda.

For ten years, from 1990 to 1999, Jacobo had as his common-law partner the graphic designer and painter Gloria Gauger.

Since 2004 his current wife is Inka Martí Kiemann, whom he married in Venice,^[5] sharing a stay between Mas Pou, in Vilaür, Girona, Madrid and Larrodrigo, in Salamanca, where through his mother's inheritance he acquired a farm converted into a project ("Airhón Project")^[6][7] that combines biodiversity research with organic agriculture and livestock farming.^{[8][9][10][11][12][13][14]}

After studying Philosophy and Literature at the Autonomous University of Madrid, he began his activity as an editor in 1980 with the publication of a bibliophile book by an anonymous French author from the 13th century, Le Morte d'Arthur, winning the first prize awarded by the Ministry of Culture for the best published book of the year.^[15]

In 1982, at the age of 26, he founded Ediciones Siruela. His first book, Sir Gawain y el Caballero Verde, inaugurated a collection in which all the most important novels of the Arthurian cycle were published for the first time in Spain. In 1983 he edited the Biblioteca de Babel, directed and with a prologue by Jorge Luis Borges and published in Italy by Franco Maria Ricci, and in 1987 he edited his own collection of fantastic literature, El Ojo sin Párpado.^[16]

In December 1985, the first issue of El Paseante appeared, an interdisciplinary cultural magazine that, from the broad and free perspective of the urban voyeur, offered a wide sample of the most important cultural and aesthetic ideas of the 1980s. Its last issue was published in 1998.

In 1989 he launched a contemporary literary collection, Libros del Tiempo, which opened with the famous essay by Italo CalvinoSei proposte per il prossimo millennio.^[17]Robert Walser, Amos Oz, George Steiner, Álvaro Mutis, António Lobo Antunes, María Zambrano, Peter Sloterdijk, Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, James Hillman, Clarice Lispector, Cees Nooteboom, Edmond Jabès, Antonio Gamoneda, Juan Eduardo Cirlot, Henry Corbin, Walter F. Otto, Károly Kerényi, Raimon Panikkar, Gershom Scholem, Leonora Carrington, Luis Cernuda, Felisberto Hernández, Carmen Martín Gaite, Jostein Gaarder y Hans Magnus Enzensberger are some of the writers, philosophers and poets that are part of his catalogue.^[18]

Other collections designed and edited by Jacobo Siruela are: El Árbol del Paraíso, La Biblioteca Azul, Biblioteca Medieval, La Biblioteca Sumergida, Biblioteca de Ensayo (Serie Mayor y Serie Menor), Biblioteca Italo Calvino^[19] and Biblioteca Lobo Antunes, and the children's literature collection Las Tres Edades, directed by Michi Strausfeld, with hits such as Sofies verden and Caperucita en Manhattan.

He also published some books that represented a great editorial challenge, such as the edition of the greatest Spanish architectural treatise: El templo de Salomón by the Jesuit from Cordoba Juan Bautista Villalpando (1552–1608).

In 2000 he sold his entire company to Germán Sánchez Ruipérez, although he continued to serve as editorial director of Ediciones Siruela.^[20]

In 2003 he won the National Prize for the Best Editorial Work awarded by the Ministry of Culture and in 2004 the Daniel Gil Prize for Editorial Design.

In 2005 he left Siruela to found, together with his wife, the journalist Inka Martí, Ediciones Atalanta,^[21][22] based in Vilaür (Girona).^[23] The publishing house develops its catalogue in four collections:^[24][25][26]

Ars Brevis, with authors ranging from classics such as Vivant Denon, Apuleius, Vernon Lee, H. G. Wells, D. H. Lawrence, Ivan Turgenev, Thomas De Quincey, Oscar Wilde and Heinrich von Kleist, to discoveries such as Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Naiyer Masud, Robert Aickman, Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, Yasutaka Tsutsui, Alejo Carpentier, Ednodio Quintero, Alberto Chimal or Eduardo Scala. It also includes various anthologies dedicated to diverse themes: vampires, the fantastic story, about the mirror, decadentism and dreams.

Memoria Mundi brings together such outstanding works in Spanish as Murasaki Shikibu's Genji Monogatari, the Jin Ping Mei, the Ramayana, the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, the Diamond Sutra followed by the Heart Sutra, the first translation of the I Ching from Chinese, the first complete version in Spanish of Giacomo Casanova's Histoire de ma vie, the complete works of Arthur Rimbaud, the One Thousand and One Nights, the Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire or the complete works of Joseph Campbell. Authors such as Richard Tarnas, Sonu Shamdasani, Jeffrey J. Kripal, José Joaquín Parra Bañón, Bernardo Kastrup, Algis Uždavinys, David Fideler, R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz, Pythagoras, Jakob Böhme, Mario Praz, Christoph Schulte, Peter Kingsley, the Zohar, Juan Arnau or Edward F. Edinger also take part.

Imaginatio Vera, with authors such as Patrick Harpur, René Daumal, James Hillman, Michael Maier, Max Ernst, Joscelyn Godwin, Károly Kerényi, Alain Daniélou, William Blake, Remedios Varo, Joseph Campbell, André Breton, Gary Lachman, Jeffrey Raff, William K. Mahony, Hilma af Klint, Edwin A. Abbott, Charles H. Hinton, Claude Bragdon, Pierre Mabille or Gustav Fechner.

Liber Naturae, which includes Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Henri Bortoft, Alfred North Whitehead, Jeremy Naydler, Arthur Firstenberg, Stephan Harding, Changlin Zhang, Christian de Quincey or Ernst Zürcher.

On November 27, 2014, he was awarded Person of the Year by Fuera de Serie, the supplement of the newspaper Expansión, in Madrid.^[27][2]

On April 30, 2018, he was awarded the Medal of Merit by the Universidad Veracruzana in Mexico.^[28][29][30]