Eugènia Broggi: "I spent the day reading and dreaming of other lives and other worlds"

Eugènia Broggi (Barcelona 1974) founded L’Altra Editorial in 2014 and in just over ten years it has become a benchmark for Catalan literature.

Grew up in the center of Eixample, in Barcelona. “There have always been a lot of tourists, a lot of people coming and going. And I do remember shops, a shoe store, a farm... but soon everything ended up being absorbed by gentrification and there was really little neighborhood life”.

Went to Aula school. "When I was little, it was great, because it was a very big school. I made friends there that I still keep. As I grew up, it became more difficult. It was a very demanding, very elitist school, and at times you could feel really out of that system. Although, obviously, there were many benefits, because we worked a lot on languages, they stimulated my reading a lot; therefore, things that have been very beneficial for me and I was able to explore them a lot there too,” she reflects.

She was a dreamy girl. “I spent the day reading and dreaming of other lives and other worlds. I’ve always had my head full of fantasy”. What did you read as a child? “Anything, I went through all the phases: The Famous Five, The Seven Secrets... there was a Bruguera collection that was the normal text, but there were pages with comics, and there, for example, I read Jules Verne, Little Women...”

Her mother was a librarian. “She was the person who guided and accompanied me in reading. She set me a rule that all books you start must be finished. But I could choose whatever I wanted. Whether it was Agatha Christie or the classics”.

She has a brother two years and two months younger. “We have a very good relationship. We’ve always shared the same circle of friends and everything. Our children are the same age. He’s a lawyer, like our father”.

Grandfather Moisès Broggi

His grandfather was the doctor Moisès Broggi. “When you are small, you don't really grasp your grandfather's public figure. I especially remember the summers we went to his house in Port de la Selva, people coming and going all the time. It was a very large family. And since he was a doctor, then someone would come in who had hurt their foot, someone who wanted to bring him a fish to thank him for having cured his daughter...”

We ask him what else he remembers about the summers in Port de la Selva. “Immense happiness, because I have always loved the sea very much and we went out in the grandfather's little boat. And I remember many free hours, I spent hours reading”.

When she was little and they asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up, she replied: a writer. "From a very young age I knew I wanted to dedicate myself to letters, since always. And that I wanted to study philology from the first year of BUP. But I've discovered that not everyone is so clear. I have two children and one of them started university this year. And last year, when he had to choose a career, he didn't know what to do. I was desperate, but everyone told me that it's the most normal thing”.

Attempt to be a writer. “After university, I went to live in London and there I started to write a little more seriously, but I wasn't entirely convinced. It was very artificial, I couldn't write for real. And besides, it was very difficult for me, it worried me a lot, I didn't enjoy it,” she explains.

And how did you get into editing? “It was while reading a book by Ramón de España, which was called Sospechosos habituales, and there was a portrait of Jorge Herralde, the editor of Anagrama. And there I began to understand what the work of an editor meant. I was also working in a bookstore in London and many editors and many publishing representatives came and went. And I started to think that perhaps my path was not so much to write myself as to read what others did. And from here the ball started to grow and I ended up here. And delighted with life, because I wouldn't change it for anything in the world”.