Elvira Lindo

Elvira Lindo is a Spanish writer, journalist, and screenwriter whose four-decade career has produced multiple defining late-20th and early-21st-century Spanish children's-fiction works — particularly her 1994 launch of the Manolito Gafotas children's-book series. She was born Elvira Lindo on January 23, 1962, in Cádiz, Andalusia, Spain. Her father Manolo Lindo was a Spanish industrial-design and construction-business engineer and her mother Nieves Garrido was a homemaker. The family relocated multiple times across her childhood to Mallorca, Madrid, and back to Mallorca following her father's professional engineering assignments.

Her education at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (journalism, without earning a degree) launched her early-career path. Her late-1980s career across Spanish national radio — particularly her work as a Radio Nacional de España broadcast journalist on the Carabanchel-area Madrid radio station — launched her early-career Spanish journalism public profile. Her 1991 first creation of the Manolito Gafotas children's character — across her early-1990s Radio Nacional de España children's radio program — launched her 1990s Spanish children's-fiction author career.

Her 1994 publication of the first Manolito Gafotas children's-fiction novel Manolito Gafotas — a comic, autobiographical-style novel about working-class Madrid Carabanchel-area neighborhood elementary-school student Manolito ("glasses") who narrates his own daily life with his Carabanchel friends and family — launched the Manolito Gafotas children's-fiction commercial breakthrough. The Manolito Gafotas series has continued across nine novels (1994, 1995, 1996, 1998, 1999, 2002, 2012, 2018, and 2021) and has produced one of the foundational late-20th and early-21st-century Spanish children's-fiction series.

Her 1998 first feature-film adaptation of the Manolito Gafotas series — Miguel Albaladejo's Manolito Gafotas — and the subsequent 1999 sequel Manolito Gafotas en ¡Mola ser jefe! produced the Manolito Gafotas film franchise. Her 2010 lead-essayist position with the Spanish national newspaper El País — and her subsequent multiple Spanish-and-American journalism awards — produced her later 2010s and 2020s Spanish journalism public profile. She married Spanish novelist Antonio Muñoz Molina in 1994 and the couple has one son.

Her name Elvira derives from the Old Germanic root meaning "truth." Elvira has been a rare but enduring American girls' name across the 20th century.