Barbara Probst Solomon

Barbara Probst Solomon, international correspondent for El Pais, in 2008 was the first American to win Spain’s most prestigious journalist award, The Francisco Cerecedo Prize. Among her many prizes, she has also won the United Nations’ Women Together Award in 2006. She has written six books of fiction, memoirs, and non-fiction, including The Beat of Life, her acclaimed 1960 early novel about abortion, Arriving Where We Started, a prize-winning classic memoir about student non-communist resistance to Franco, listed in Amherst's 100 Great Books list, Short Flights, a memoir about the last days of Franco and the transition in Spain, Smart Hearts in the City, a 1990s novel about Harlem real estate, the rise of the black technocrat bourgeoisie, containing a loving story of a white girl and black boy in Westport, CT in the 1940s. The love story is patterned after Huckleberry Finn. Horse-Trading and Ecstasy contains Solomon's best essays and interviews, notably her coverage of the Klaus Barbie trial in Lyon, France. Her work on the Barbie trial won high praise from the NY Times and the French press. Solomon is now completing The King of Paris, her documentary novel about high-ranking Nazis in WWII France. She has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker and The New Republic. She is editor-in-chief of the international literary magazine The Reading Room, whose website is www.readingroomjournal.com. Her film documentary,When the War Was Over, won Boston University’s Lawrence Law Whyte Award for film. She has taught in universities here and abroad. Photo taken by Jill Krementz, 2009.