Giles E.H. Tremlett (born Plymouth, 1962)[1] is a historian, author and journalist based in Madrid, Spain.
Tremlett is author of five works of history and non-fiction that have been translated into half a dozen languages. He won the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography in 2018. He has held various roles for The Guardian, including as chief correspondent in Iberia and as a Long Reads writer.[2] He previously wrote for The Economist. He was a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics for five years from 2016.
He graduated in Human Sciences at the University of Oxford in 1984 and has also studied at the Universities of Barcelona and Lisbon.
He had his first taste of Spanish life when he lived in Barcelona for two years in the mid-1980s. After a period in Lisbon and then in London he returned to Spain in the mid-1990s. He was The Guardians correspondent for Spain, Portugal and the Maghreb for a dozen years. He was also Madrid correspondent for The Economist for a decade until 2016. In 2012 he was voted Correspondent of the Year by the Madrid International Press Club. He has been a regular current affairs commentator for Spanish broadcasters, including state-owned TVE television, La Sexta and the country's biggest radio station, Cadena SER, as well as contributing to newspapers like El País or El Mundo. He was co-founder and curator of the Docubeats documentary project at The Guardian and El País.
He has been a guest lecturer on journalism or contemporary Spanish history and participant in seminars at numerous universities, including Oxford, MIT and Stanford.
Tremlett is a twin. He moved around the world from an early age, following his father Colonel Edward Tremlett to postings in South Africa, Tanzania, Kenya, Turkey and Germany.
His book Ghosts of Spain: Travels through a country's hidden past (2007)[3] was translated into five languages.
In 2010 he published a biography of Catherine of Aragon, the Spanish infanta who became Henry VIII's first wife, with Faber and Faber in London and Walker in New York. Catherine of Aragon was BBC Radio 4's "Book of the Week" and was short-listed for the HW Fisher Best First Biography Prize. It has been translated into Spanish, Russian and Polish.
His biography of Isabella of Castile – the Spanish queen who sent Columbus to the Americas – was published in 2017.[4] It won the Elizabeth Longford Prize in 2018.[5] It was a top-selling history book in Spain in 2018 and has also been translated into Portuguese and Chinese.
In October 2020 he published The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and the Spanish Civil War, which was a Guardian newspaper "book of the Day". It draws on archive material held in Moscow and recently made available to historians. According to the historian Sir Paul Preston, it provides "in lucid and compelling prose, the overall history of the Brigades that has been lacking". In popular media opinions differ from generally favourable though warning that the volume might seem "overly sympathetic to the Brigades",[6] to the statement that "this book is as close to a definitive history as we are likely to get".[7]
Critical studies and reviews of Tremlett's work:
Ghosts of Spain
Catherine of Aragon
Isabella of Castile
The International Brigades
España: A Brief History of Spain