The Brazilian publisher that only publishes books in Catalan

BarcelonaBeatriz Bittencourt, known simply as Bia, is an editor born in São Paulo, the economic capital of Brazil and the most populous city in the Southern Hemisphere. Before coming to live in Catalonia, she worked for the most influential newspaper in the Latin American country, Folha de São Paulo. She also ran a bookstore and collaborated with Plana, an independent literature festival. With this background, she landed in Barcelona in 2018, driven by personal reasons. Upon arrival, she founded the publishing house No Libros, with the desire to integrate into Catalan society through a project based on the premise of creating other forms of knowledge circulation and production. Before fully discovering what she wanted to do, she admits that she edited varied works by different authors, in search of a common thread that would give meaning to the whole of her publications.

As she became more familiar with the city and its particularities, Bittencourt made decisions that determined the current identity of No Libros. By closely observing the situation of the Catalan language, and by learning it, she identified a parallel with the reality of indigenous, Amazonian, and creole languages, which also struggle to survive in contexts of linguistic marginalization. “The moment you learn a language that has so many resistances and such an intense political feeling, if you already have a background in activism, you find a channel,” explains Bittencourt, who then gave her project a more concrete and coherent meaning.

Since then, No Libros' main publications are The Desire of Others, in which Brazilian anthropologist Hanna Limuljai dissects the listening of dreams, an ancestral practice of the Yanomami tribe that she compares with psychoanalysis, and The Land Gives, The Land Wants, a dissertation by Antônio Nêgo Bispo, born in a community of freed slaves, the first literate person from a quilombola lineage. Both works, translated by Jèssica Cañagueral Pallarés, were originally published in Portuguese by Ubu Editora. Among upcoming publications, she will translate the work of Brazilian archaeologist Eduardo Góes Neves, During the Times of the Equinox. Eight Thousand Years of History in Central Amazonia, and that of the young Argentine writer Michel Nieva Capitalist Science Fiction, published in Spanish by Anagrama. That is, No Libros will continue to bet on the publication of Latin American authors previously unpublished in Catalan, who offer a critical perspective from the Global South. Among the works already published is also the essay by a Brazilian author residing in Barcelona, Laura del Vecchio, who wrote the work in Catalan: Brunzzzit Against Collapse (2026).

Ubu Editora, with whom Bittencourt has been in contact since she worked in Brazil, continues the legacy of Cosac Naify, a historic Brazilian publishing house specializing in decolonial, non-Western, and non-hegemonic thought. The name No Libros is not, as one might initially think, a reference to René Magritte's famous painting. The negation of the book is a declaration of principles. Bittencourt was traumatized when she learned that all of Cosac Naify's books that had remained unsold in the warehouse had to be burned once the publishing house closed in 2015. Three years later, No Libros was born as an act of protest against this waste, and therefore prints with sustainable techniques on a small scale. “I want to publish books, not create a multinational,” claims Bittencourt. Her publishing project is, ultimately, an extension of a firm commitment to show Catalan culture "other ways of perceiving the world" and to establish dialogues with the authors from the Global South whom she translates and will eventually bring to Barcelona. 

Laboratories of Collective Translation

Another original publication from Ubu that No Libros will soon publish is Vozes vegetáis (2021), co-written by the anthropologist Karen Shiratori. In this case, however, the preparation of the book has become a laboratory for collective translation from Portuguese to Catalan, driven by collaboration with the Guimarães Rosa Institute, the Camões Institute, the Autonomous University of Barcelona, the University of Barcelona, and the book's co-author herself. During the monthly meetings, the laboratory participants receive advice from university experts, share their proposals, and discuss the challenges presented by the translation of the work. The objective of the activity is extensible to that of Bittencourt's editorial project: to develop a glossary that collects a whole series of words, ideas, and concepts used by Latin American authors who draw from languages and intellectual frameworks very distant from ours.