Òscar Andreu recommends a prose of combat still valid

Franco's censorship was implacable with Manuel de Pedrolo (1918-1990). The essay "Cartes de Catalunya", written in 1966 and described by censors as a text of "definitively separatist character" and "political propaganda with particular violence", was rejected by him up to three times. Comanegra recovered Cartes de Catalunya in 2025 and included it in the anthology Prosa de combat, which brings together some forty articles by Pedrolo published between 1964 and 1988, some of which are also unpublished. This anthology is the book recommended by Òscar Andreu, co-director of the program La competència on RAC1, presenter of Està passant on TV3, and author of Manual de defensa del català (Univers, 2026), the best-selling non-fiction book in Catalan on the last Sant Jordi.

In Prosa de combat there are articles, essays, and short essays (some of which did not see the light of day due to censorship) by Pedrolo on the national freedom of the Catalans from many diverse and varied points of view," explains Òscar Andreu. Tenacious and combative by nature, Pedrolo also made the defense of Catalan a major battle, surely without the humor that enlivens Òscar's texts that do not have bangs. "Pedrolo wrote the articles collected in Prosa de combat in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, "but they are unfortunately still relevant," says Andreu. "The prose is also relevant, clear, and not at all stiff," he adds before highlighting a quote from the author of Mecanoscrit del segon origen. "Any oppressed community deserves to be given the opportunity to prove that it has something in its belly, and no one will give it that opportunity – least of all the colonizer".