Josep Palàcios, one of the most hermetic and fascinating writers of Catalan literature, dies.

BarcelonaWriter and editor Josep Palàcios i Martínez passed away early this morning. He was 87 years old. Born in Sueca (Valencia) in 1938, he began his public literary career in 1959 with the verses ofThe four seasons (1957 Valencia Prize for Literature-Poetry). He was a very meticulous writer. Heir and executor of Joan Fuster, he has been one of the most secretive figures in Catalan literature.

In the 1980s, after years of silence, he began collaborating with the illustrator Manuel Boix. Together they created several artist's books and bibliophile volumes. Boix illustrated several of the author's titles, such as Birds, mirrors, in 1981, and the work, also narrative, The snake, the river, in 1986. With the book of poems Devastation, won the Critics' Prize of the Valencian Country in 1981. In 1984 he published the poetry collection Inventory and, in 1986, Hinge.

With the work Alphabet (1989), won the 1990 Sierra de Oro Critics' Prize for short stories. This is one of the author's most widely recognized titles. In 1991 he received the Valencian Critics' Prize for theatre for Triptych of Tirant lo Blanc (1990).

After a new period of silence, in 2009 he published the poem A nude, 165 pages. In 2013 he published The image (Publications of the University of Valencia, 2013). It is almost 300 pages long, where Palácios brings together all his publishable production (as he himself decided). It begins with Alphabet and ends with Destruction test.

He was a writer who didn't like interviews. He preferred to be locked away at home, reworking his texts over and over again. He liked to blow up the canon. In The Image you can read: "At this moment, I can't remember the name of any good writer. Are there any? Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Goethe... are they among the good ones? Still? Are they great writers or clichés? Aren't they too, I would risk saying, read, seen? Are they quoted too much? To read too much? To read too much? At another point he writes: "It's funny, but the truth is that I don't recognize the influence of any Catalan writer, but only of their dictionaries." Of course, in that same provocative style he also satirized himself: "The "pure writers," as they say I am without knowing what they are saying, "give the image of the writer," because, on the one hand, we are "frustrated writers," even though we continue to write, and, on the other, we are "failed writers."

Palácios was also a translator, especially of the work of Albert Camus, and he took care of the edition of Throwing the White in four volumes with engravings by Manuel Boix between 1978 and 1983. In addition, he was curator, together with Antoni Furió, of the reissue of the complete works of Joan Fuster (2002 and 2012).

Josep Pla described the writer in this way in Homenots: "I thought Palacios was a very discreet young man, very measured in his way of speaking, rather dry with his words, with a very pleasant delivery." According to Palácios, his entire work could be summarized in the principles of two of his books: "I Have Imagined Everything" and "An Empty Cathedral, Clean, Without Images, and God Playing Bach's Music on the Organ. I, the Celebrant of Nothingness."

On social media, various writers, editors, and institutions have lamented the writer's death and remembered him through his verses.