Born in Villablino (León) in 1942, Mateo Díez has shaped his own personal universe in his work, with its desolate characters and landscape who leave their homeland but are transfigured by imagination.

Luis Mateo Díez is at the peak of his skills as a writer and in posession of every narrative technique and a dazzling style that reaches extremes of simplicity and complexity. He has been translated into German, French, English, Dutch, Italian, Greek and Polish, and some of his stories have been adapted for the cinema.

In 2000 he was elected a member of the Real Academia Española.