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In 1989 he travelled to London and worked for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) World Service, in its Latin American Department. He also wrote the introduction to the Spanish edition of Rupert Sheldrake’s book “The Presence of the Past” (Kairós, 1990). Shortly afterwards, he became a science staff writer for CONOCER (1991–1997), a Spanish monthly science publication.
In 1998 he began contributing to New Scientist magazine as a freelancer. Later, he wrote science and social stories for Scientific American, the oldest science magazine in the United States, published in New York.
Also in 1998, Luis joined the team that founded the newspaper La Razón, where he headed the science section until 2006. He has also lent his expertise in science and health to several radio programmes in Spain: Clave de Ciencia (2000–2002), a daily science news programme on Radio Nacional de España, the country’s largest public broadcaster, and, more recently, A Hombros de Gigantes, which has been on the air for more than 10 years.
In 2000 he worked as scientific coordinator, interviewer and writer for 2.Mil, a series on the Spanish public broadcaster RTVE, which featured exclusive interviews with outstanding scientific figures such as Donald Johanson, the discoverer of the famous fossil “Lucy”, the roboticist Hans Moravec, the British cosmologist and astronomer Fred Hoyle and the zoologist Clyde Roper (known as “Dr Squid” for his search for the giant squid), among many others.
In 2002 Luis published his bestseller “La Sombra del Chamán” (Random House, Plaza & Janés, 2002), the story of the search for a magic bullet against cancer in the lost worlds of Venezuela, where ancestral rites, magic and technology meet in a brilliant plot. It has sold over 33,000 copies in Spain alone, with four reprints and paperback editions, and several thousand copies and e-books in Germany. Kraken (2005), a thriller involving the deep ocean, Mars research and the oil industry, was translated into German with two reprints. Luis also published Proyecto Lázaro in September 2007. His latest novel, Los Hijos del Cielo, was released by Martínez Roca Ediciones in February 2010, with a print run of 15,000 copies.
Luis writes for magazines such as El País Semanal, the weekly magazine of Spain’s leading newspaper, El País, with an estimated readership of around one million, and Muy Interesante, undoubtedly the best-selling and most widely read popular science monthly in Spain, with a circulation of more than 300,000 copies and a million readers.
Luis also holds a doctorate in journalism, awarded cum laude, from the Complutense University of Madrid, and is an expert on science fiction and on the influence of classic and modern films on society. He recently published a book on the philosophy of modern science fiction films with Arpa Editores.
