The pioneering challenge of explaining the history of Catalonia from the perspective of women

Barcelona"Be reborn from history. Dream it and remake it," said the poet Pere Quart. Montserrat Duch Plana (Tarragona, 1959), a professor at the Rovira i Virgili University, has kept these words very much in mind when taking on a "pioneering challenge": to explain the history of Catalonia from the perspective of women and the contribution they have made. "Until now, we had a chronic deficit: we had explained history from the perspective of men and from activities like power and business. Aspects such as daily life, work, or sexuality, in which women have been fundamental, have been left aside," explained Duch this Wednesday during the presentation of Grup 62's autumn novelties, which highlighted History of Women, which Edicions 62 will put on sale at the end of October. "Many European countries have a history of women like the one that will see the light of day at Edicions 62 this October. The first, History of Women in the West, was coordinated by Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot in 1990. Since then, 36 years have passed. It is time to fill this gap," he added.

Duch, who has previously written books such as Bread and Roses (Base, 2023) and The Gender of the Polis (Arola, 2013), has directed the ambitious project, which includes the contribution of around seventy specialists – women and men – who "recover for the general public a hundred episodes in different areas in which women have played a decisive role". "There are seven blocks that advance diachronically, from prehistory to the present, on topics such as reproduction, education, religion, social movements, work and inequalities, leisure, festivities and sports, and also creation: we must not forget that women have been and are great creators".

The director of the project, which exceeds 600 pages, assures that History of Women "is far from victimisation logics". And she adds: "This history of women empowers us in an egalitarian way and from a Catalan national point of view".

A very positive assessment

The fifteen imprints that currently make up Grup 62 and which publish around 500 new titles a year will present, from September until the end of the year, books as valuable as Poesia 1957 by Josep Carner and the Complete Works, in two volumes, by Màrius Torres, alongside new works by Éric Vuillard, Raquel Ricart, Laura Gost, Byung-Chul Han, Ada Castells, Martí Gironell and Jordi Coca, as well as revivals by Ingeborg Bachmann, Amin Maalouf and Konstandinos P. Kavafis. "The publishing sector is in a period of prosperity both in Catalonia and in the State as a whole – assured Emili Rosales, editorial director of Grup 62–. We closed 2025 with 4% growth, a figure that confirms the upward trend of recent years. Since the pandemic, the publishing market has already grown by 30%. The youth segment is where reading is growing the most." Rosales also took the opportunity to recall the "transversality" of the group's editorial proposals: "One out of every three books sold in Catalan is by an author who publishes with us".