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

BarcelonaIt so happens that, with a few weeks' difference, two of the great architects of the Tusquets publishing house have died. First was the poet and professor Antoni Marí (1944-2026), who besides being an in-house author 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 the publishing house, which said goodbye to her remembering her as "a brilliant and unprejudiced woman, cosmopolitan and feisty, a precursor 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 Copito de Nieve had settled in the Barcelona zoo".

The project was launched with two collections in Spanish: Cuadernos Ínfimos and Marginales. In the first, they published translations of 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 simultaneously incorporating new figures in Spanish 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 championed 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 Márkaris, Henning Mankell, and novels such as Una vida al carrer, by Jordi Ibáñez Fanés.

The mission of good editors

"In the 70s, in the midst of an oil crisis that affected sales, Giulio Einaudi told me not to get discouraged, that until I overcame the third crisis I could not consider that the years of penance were behind me – recalled de Moura in 2013, in 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."

wrote that the mission left to the editor is to seek out that scattered tribe that wants literature that is gold and not straw.