Héctor Bellerín’s summer holidays look a little different from your typical footballer. Rather than pictures from a recent jaunt to Ibiza clubs such as Ushuaia or questionable birthday parties, his Instagram is dominated by books.
Images of paperbacks he’s read are all over his feed, a mix of classics and contemporary novels, with a majority from Spain and South America.
Alana Portero’s celebrated (and Pedro Almodóvar-approved) novels about queer life in 80s Madrid feature on his read pile, alongside the Mexican Juan Rulfo’s classic surrealist novel Pedro Páramo, which inspired a young Gabriel García Márquez to write One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Federico García Lorca’s Gypsy Ballads.
Bellerín, who played for Arsenal for nine years before moving back to his native Spain with Real Betis, talks about literature’s transformative power.
“Literature has become something that has – and I know it’s a cliche – but to me, it has completely changed my life,” he said from a Betis training camp in Portugal.
Bellerín’s love of literature was sparked during the Covid-19 lockdowns, when the young full-back was isolating in his home in St Albans, Hertfordshire. He began reading the novels of Charles Bukowski while he was still playing for Arsenal.
He made his way through Hollywood and Post Office, the American writer’s autobiographical debut, which follows the life of the sardonic anti-hero Henry Chinaski. “I was miserable in quarantine,” said Bellerín. “I didn’t know when football was going to come back. I was even drinking a lot … I had a bit of a tough time. Literature, I’m not gonna say made me survive, but it made my life way easier.”
Some footballers might shy away from sharing their love of reading, especially in a climate when anything outside the football bubble is deemed a “distraction”, but Bellerín has made no secret of his interests beyond sport.
He’s flirted with fashion, and even started his own label. He loves photography, and believes passionately in the power of art to help with mental health. He has been a vocal advocate for sustainability in football, and in 2022 he criticised the lack of media coverage of conflicts in Palestine, Iraq and Yemen compared with Ukraine.
Bellerín grew up in a house of books. His father had a passion for ancient Greece, which inspired Bellerín’s first name. But between the ages of 19 and 26 he read mostly nonfiction (mirroring the habits of many young men).
Reading was something he did to learn something, rather than for pleasure. “When I read something, it had to have a purpose and then I realised it was the other way around,” he said.
The work of the German-Swiss novelist Hermann Hesse followed Bukowski, but after making his way through 10 books, the Spaniard realised that he’d only read male writers and made a conscious decision to read more women.
He moved on to The Vegetarian by the Nobel prize winner Han Kang, and Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger, while cool, contemporary Spanish writers such as José Luis Sastre, Adrian Daine, Marta Jiménez Serrano, Carolina Yuste and the Granta young writer Cristina Morales dominate his book piles.
Sergio C Fanjul, a culture writer at the Spanish daily El País, said the list showed Bellerín was “closely attuned to the pulse of the publishing world”, with writers such as Portero, Leila Guerriero, Marta Jiménez Serrano, Juan Tallon and Alejandro Zambra being some of the “most critically acclaimed writers” of recent years. “I think Bellerín is a reader who doesn’t simply follow mainstream trends,” Fanjul added.
On his Portuguese training trip he’s brought a book of Leslie Jamison essays, Mary Karr’s Art of Memoir, Sara Mesa’s Cara de Pan, Simon Critchley’s What We Think About When We Think About Football and Samanta Schweblin’s Little Eyes, which the Guardian called “ingenious”.
The footballer gets recommendations from a writing group he attends every Tuesday night in Seville. Made up of students, doctors and engineers, the group has introduced him to the contemporary Spanish literary scene.
“We feed off each other, recommending books and movies. My taste has also changed, because the people I’ve got around me have great taste and give great recommendations, new names and new faces and new ways of writing.”
There’s only one book that’s defeated him.
He tried Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights in the original English before reverting to the Spanish translation, titled Cumbres Borrascosas. “I couldn’t get through that in English,” Bellerín confessed. “I tried it, but couldn’t.”