Top editor Claudio López dies aged 59

The editorial director of Penguin Random House, Claudio López Lamadrid, died of a stroke in a Barcelona hospital on Friday night at the age of 59. López had been the editorial director of Penguin Random House since 2000, a post in which he led publishing strategies and projects for the company in Spain and Latin America. Before that he worked for 10 years at Tusquets Editores and the Círculo de Lectores, through the Galaxia Gutenberg publishers. In 1997 he was appointed literary director of Grijalbo, which would be later taken over by Mondadori, and for which he built up a catalogue of prestigious authors that included the likes of David Foster Wallace, Gabriel García Márquez and Philip Roth.

López also translated and published Nobel prizewinning authors, such as J. M. Coetzee and Amos Oz, and he was credited with discovering such writers as César Aira and Javier Cercas.