Irene Solà, the writer who could have made a pact with the devil

BarcelonaThe robust, flexible, and young voice of Irene Solà (Malla, 1990) has won over thousands of readers around the world in less than a decade, and is currently one of the most translated and beloved authors in Catalan literature. The meteoric and still rising trajectory of the writer from Osona might lead the most malicious minds to think of a pact with the devil to gain such unusual repercussions. Solà has managed to have When I Sing and the Mountain Dances (Anagrama, 2019) translated into 23 languages and has garnered awards such as the Anagrama Novel Prize, the European Union Prize for Literature, and the Nota Bene Prize. Before this great success, which included a theatrical adaptation and even a symphonic work, Solà had already received the Documenta Prize for The Dikes (L'Altra, 2017) and the Amadeu Oller Prize for Beast (Galerada, 2012), her only collection of poems, which Anagrama has just reissued.

"They tore me out like an onion / they gave me a name / and they pierced my ears": with these three verses, the author summarized her birth. With these others, she explained how her father combed her hair: "The clumsy hands for small things / moved my head / like a harvesting machine. / The damp, bristly wheat / starting to rot / became thin / and pulled me backward, / and my ponytail lasted / until breakfast". After studying fine arts at the University of Barcelona, Solà completed a master's degree in literature, film, and visual culture at the University of Sussex. "The five years I spent in fine arts allowed me to learn how to pursue ideas and develop long projects –she recalled shortly after publishing The Dikes–. Writing is cutting pieces out of everyone's life".

Interested in blending "rurality and experimentalism," the author took a step forward with When I Sing, Mountains Dance, where she gave voice to a gallery of human, animal, and mythological characters through a mosaic of stories set in the Pyrenees, between Camprodon and Prats de Molló. "Words move everything, they have great power and magic", Solà explained. As if she had cast a spell, she made more than 100,000 readers become bewitched by the book, and the phenomenon did not take long to cross borders. With her third and, for the moment, latest novel, I Gave You Eyes and You Looked into the Darkness (Anagrama, 2023), the writer has triumphed again: it has been translated into 18 languages and has won awards such as the Finestres, the Lletra d'Or, and the European Union Prize for Literature. The book proposes a dazzling journey to a house lost in the middle of the Guilleries where there is a group of women who, once dead, remember their past lives. The founder of the lineage is Joana, "an ugly woman who is looking for a husband, but cannot find one in any way" – in the author's words – until she makes the decision to ask the devil for help and make a pact with him that she will soon end up breaking. Perhaps this freedom to crumble the rules, and not any kind of pact, is the secret of Irene Solà's success.