Mauro Javier Cárdenas was born and brought up in Guayaquil, Ecuador and studied Economics at Stanford University. His debut novel, The Revolutionaries Try Again, was published in 2016. He was awarded the 2016 Joseph Henry Jackson Award and was included in the Hay Festival anthology Bogotá39: New Voices from Latin America (Oneworld, 2018), a selection of the best young Latin American novelists working today.