Beatriz de Moura dies, founder and soul of Tusquets publishing house

BarcelonaChance has led to the deaths of two of the great architects of Tusquets publishing house, just weeks apart. First was the poet and professor Antoni Marí (1944-2026), who, in addition to being an author for the house, had directed the Catalan collection, L'Ull de Vidre, and the poetry collection, Nuevos Textos Sagrados. And this Friday it was its founder and literary director for decades, Beatriz de Moura, according to information from the publishing house, which bid farewell to her by remembering her as "a brilliant and unpretentious woman, cosmopolitan and feisty, a pioneer of so many things and the soul of the publishing house".

Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1939, the daughter of a Brazilian diplomat, in the early sixties Beatriz de Moura settled in Barcelona, where she worked for publishing houses such as Gustavo Gili, Salvat and Lumen before launching her own project, Tusquets Editores, together with the architect and then husband Oscar Tusquets. Linked to the gauche divine –like other editors of the time, such as Jorge Herralde and Josep Maria Castellet–, Beatriz de Moura liked to recall that she had chosen 1969 to create Tusquets because it was "the year man had reached the moon and Snowflake had arrived at the Barcelona zoo".

The project was born with two collections in Spanish: Cuadernos Ínfimos and Marginales. In the first, they published translations by authors such as Umberto Eco, Antonio Gramsci, Tom Wolfe, James Joyce, Jonathan Swift, Antonin Artaud, Roland Barthes, Robert Musil and E. M. Cioran. The Marginales collection was launched with Residua, a compendium of texts by Samuel Beckett, who in 1969 had just won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The publishing house's first major success was the publication, in 1970, of Relato de un náufrago, by Gabriel García Márquez.

Cosmopolitanism and a good eye

The cosmopolitan, intrepid, and literary catalog of the publishing house later grew with names such as Milan Kundera, Susan Sontag, Marguerite Duras, John Irving, Haruki Murakami, and Fleur Jaeggy, while at the same time incorporating new talents from Castilian literature such as Enrique Vila-Matas and Almudena Grandes, who became known with Las edades de Lulú (1989), winner of the erotic narrative prize La Sonrisa Vertical. This award was created by Tusquets in 1977 and was active until 2004, when it was replaced by the Tusquets Novel Prize, which supported Fernando Aramburu, Élmer Mendoza, and Rafael Reig.

Meanwhile, Beatriz de Moura had been one of the promoters of Foro Babel, in 1996, against linguistic normalization, along with Félix de Azúa, Victoria Camps, Juan Marsé, and Rosa Regàs, among others. Five years later, in 2001, she created a collection in Catalan at the publishing house, L'Ull de Vidre, which featured translations by Petros Màrkaris, Henning Mankell, and novels such as Una vida al carrer, by Jordi Ibáñez Fanés.

The mission of good editors

"In the 70s, amidst an oil crisis that affected sales, Giulio Einaudi told me not to get discouraged, that until I overcame the third crisis I couldn't consider the years of penance behind me – recalled de Moura in 2013, at the closing lecture of the master's degree in publishing at Pompeu Fabra University–. Recently, Roberto Calasso has written that the mission left to the editor is to seek out that scattered tribe that wants literature that is gold and not straw".

It had been barely a year since Tusquets had become part of Grupo Planeta, which continues to manage its catalog and expand it with about forty titles annually, and Beatriz de Moura was pessimistic about the future of the publishing sector: "The book has ceased to be the main path to knowledge. After more than four decades of work, I realized that reading is no longer indispensable, it has become an accessory. The editor's obligation is to pass on something of what remains of the battered tradition before the Wikipedian era and the cult of ephemerality".