José María Álvarez (31 May 1942 – 7 July 2024) was a Spanish poet and novelist.
The principal work of Álvarez is Museo de cera (Wax Museum),[1] which was a work in progress for many years due to the author's endeavouring to complete a unique and all-encompassing book (un libro único y totalizador).
Álvarez also translated into Spanish the work of, among others, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edgar Allan Poe, Jack London, T.S.
Eliot, Shakespeare, François Villon, the complete works of Constantine P. Cavafy, and the poems from the years of madness of Friedrich Hölderlin.
His protagonist is no revolutionary wishing to change lives, but a bon vivant, a disdainer of vulgarity, and a lover of lost causes.