# /elpais/authors

`POST /api/elpais/authors`

Price: 10 credits

Get one El Pais journalist by alias: display name, biography, portrait, author page URL, the title they write for and the URL of their most recent article.

## How to use it

Resolve an El Pais byline to its author record. alias is the slug used in /autor/ URLs ('juan-diego-quesada'), which elpais/articles and the listing endpoints return in authors[].alias; a full author page URL is accepted too, an 'en/' prefix switches to the author's page on english.elpais.com and a 'cd/' prefix to Cinco Dias. Returns name, bio, image, web_url, language, publication and latest_article_url. El Pais keeps no biography on the author page itself, so bio and image are read from the 'Sobre la firma' box on the journalist's two most recent articles, which costs one or two further requests. Both come back empty when neither of those two articles carries the box: always on the English edition, which publishes no such box at all, on agency and house bylines that have no biography, and on a journalist whose biography appears only on an older piece. Use elpais/authors/articles for the catalogue of articles.

## Parameters

- `access-token` (string, required)

## Request body

- `timeout` (integer) — Max scrapping execution timeout (in seconds) (default: 300; min: 20; max: 1500)
- `alias` (string, required) — El Pais author alias, or the URL of the author page; prefix with en/ for the English edition or cd/ for Cinco Dias (examples: "juan-diego-quesada", "https://elpais.com/autor/mariam-martinez-bascunan/", "en/miguel-jimenez", "cd/nuno-rodrigo-palacios"; minLength: 1)

## Response

### 200 — Successful Response

- `@type` (string) (default: "ElpaisAuthorProfile")
- `alias` (string, required)
- `name` (string, required)
- `web_url` (string, required)
- `language` (string, required)
- `publication` (string, required)
- `bio` (string, nullable)
- `image` (string, nullable)
- `latest_article_url` (string, nullable)

## Errors

### 422 — Validation Error

Not an El Pais author alias or author page URL

What to do: Check the fields against this schema. A URN with the wrong prefix is the most common cause.

- `detail` (array)
  - `loc` (array, required)
  - `msg` (string, required)
  - `type` (string, required)
  - `input` (any)
  - `ctx` (object)

### 408

The request ran past its time limit

What to do: Raise `timeout` in the request body, up to the maximum this endpoint documents. Lowering `count` or turning off the `with_*` flags also helps, because less work finishes sooner.

### 412

No El Pais author page for this alias

What to do: Retrying will not help: either the entity does not exist, or the input points at a different one.

### 429

Too many requests: a rate limit or a usage window is exhausted

What to do: When the response carries an X-Retry-After header, wait that many seconds and retry: the same number is in the body as `detail.retry_after`, and the limit clears once that window passes. The message in the body names the limit that was hit.

### 500

Something broke on our side

What to do: Retrying will not help. If it keeps happening, send us the X-Request-ID from the response headers.

### 529

Rate limit reached, or the endpoint is overloaded

What to do: Wait at least 30 seconds, then retry.

## Response envelope

Success: Array of objects (may be empty if no results)

Error: Error may coexist with partial results if it occurs mid-execution. Check X-Error header and status code.

Every response carries these headers:

- `X-Error` — Error message text (present only on error)
- `X-Request-ID` — Unique request identifier
- `X-Execution-Time` — Execution time in seconds
- `X-Result-Count` — How many records the body carries. 0 means an empty result, which is a normal answer and not by itself an error. A non-zero count can come back together with X-Error when the failure happened partway through — read this header and X-Error independently.
- `X-Total-Available-Results` — How many records exist for this query, when the endpoint can say. On a `dry_run` request this is the answer and the body is empty. It saturates: the endpoint's documented maximum means 'at least that many', any smaller number is exact.
- `X-Warning` — Present when the request body carried keys this endpoint does not document. They were ignored, so any filter you meant to apply through them did not apply. Check the spelling against this schema and retry.
- `X-Retry-After` — Seconds to wait before retrying. Present only on 429.