The new Law on the own and official language has not managed to stop the decline of Catalan in Andorra. The Government made public this Monday the study on linguistic knowledge and usage of the population, and two headlines stand out. On one hand, the social use of Catalan falls eight points in four years (from 63.7 to 55.9%) and practically ties with the habitual use of Spanish, which grows six points (from 48.6 to 55%). On the other hand, there is a significant rise in citizens who have Spanish as their mother tongue: 47% have Spanish as their initial language and 39% have Catalan as their mother tongue. This reverses the figures from the previous survey four years ago, when 44% of respondents had Catalan as their initial language and 40%, Spanish.

She is so trained to negotiate that she even does it with herself when people take her picture. For her WhatsApp photo, she negotiated between credibility and approachability. She arrived at labor mediation after passing through advertising agencies, an environment she remembers as hostile, with an excessive workload, constant urgency, inequality, a lack of corporate structure, and abuse of vocational passion. Later she founded Civic. We roll up our sleeves to get down to work.

A study from Pompeu Fabra University reveals that young people can improve their Catalan thanks to short videos on TikTok and Instagram. The research analyzed the quality of short videos on social networks and surveyed 76 users aged 14 to 25. The result: 8 out of 10 Catalan speakers claim that their Catalan has improved thanks to this content.

I wanted to write a chronicle of the presentation of Laetitia Colombani's new novel, Laetitia Colombani, A Day Without Women (La Magrana / Salamandra, 2026), without using the verb to braid. I try a few times and give up. It’s not that I’m in a hurry to pull the ace of The Braid out of my sleeve to hook you into the article, but I have to use the simile of weaving and braiding because the author returns to that structure with which she found success. Let me explain the success: Colombani published her first novel, The Braid, nearly ten years ago, which was an immediate global phenomenon and which, with 8 million copies sold in forty languages, changed her life.

The leading German Catalanist, Til Stegmann, has died at the age of 85. A professor of Romance philology at the University of Frankfurt, where a memorial service was held this weekend, Stegmann was the great Ambassador of Catalonia to Germany (Pagès Editors, 2015), as his memoirs were titled. He dedicated a good part of his life to civic diplomacy, spreading Catalan culture, language, and the political situation in that country. In his role as a cultural bridge, he was one of the key instigators behind the guest literature at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2007 being Catalan, one of the peaks in the dissemination of our language. In 1980, his appearance on the program Vostè pregunta had a great media impact.

Perhaps if you are used to seeing death, you worry more about celebrating life. The first photo that Josep Ventura put on his WhatsApp is the one that has remained there: a lunch for his birthday with his family. He was born among coffins, because he comes from a lineage of undertakers that dates back to the 17th century, but he says he continues in the profession because he has inherited the vocation of helping others in the most delicate moments. He is the CEO of Àltima, one of the large Catalan companies in the sector.

The well-known film, theater, and dubbing actress Pepa Arenós (Barcelona, 1948) passed away this Sunday at the age of 78. For some, Rosalia from Ventdeplà is gone; for others, one of the actresses from the first Catalan soap opera, La Granja, where she also played a Rosalia; and for still others, the voice of Baba, the fortune teller from Dragon Ball, one of the numerous characters she dubbed, has been silenced. In addition to being a great actress, Pepa Arenós demonstrated a strong political commitment, first as an anti-Franco militant of Bandera Roja and the PSUC and, more recently, as an independence activist. She participated as a presenter at the National Day of Catalonia on September 11, 1976, in Sant Boi. In recent years, in addition to the Procés, she participated in the hundreds of demonstrations held to turn the Via Laietana police station into a memorial site. Colleagues from the Via Laietana 43 platform confirmed her passing to ARA.

"It is very hard to find people who speak Catalan, it depends on the environment you move in –claims Martí Vila from Manresa–. And it is also a drag to hook up at parties, it is very superficial and there are people who are wasted". Faced with this double problem, this 20-year-old programmer and his friend Teo Garcia, a mathematics student, decided to seek a solution. This summer they shut themselves in a house in Rupit to devise, from the epicenter of our beloved Catalonia, an application for hooking up exclusively in Catalan.

If there is a crucial moment in the life of Douglas Stuart (Glasgow, 1976), we should place it in 2019. Until then, Stuart had had a complicated childhood as the son of a single, working-class mother who had died of alcoholism when he was 16, and, conversely, a liberating youth, because he had managed to graduate from university in London and move to New York to work in the sparkling world of fashion. "I had always thought that writing would be my passion and fashion my job," he recalls. Until 2019. That year he submitted the manuscript for Shuggie Bain, which would receive the 2020 Booker Prize and turn him into a world-famous writer.

The writer Carlota Gurt dressed as a little boxing devil standing firm on a stool. She rings a bell to stop tourists and passersby and explains that she will give 6 lectures of 6 minutes each at 6 points in the Gothic Quarter. "Is it a coincidence that it is the devil's number?". Obviously, no. Gurt puts her literary talent at the service of the bread-and-butter work she has to do, but also her critical capacity; it all goes in the same package. The route she will offer us this Wednesday is part of the Artistic Shop Windows cycle, a project promoted by the magazine Hänsel* and Gretel* to spread art through the shops (the decent shops that remain) in this ultra-touristed area.

The photo on her mobile phone explains the adoration Carme Portaceli has for animals and, specifically, for dogs. Since her life without schedules does not allow her to have one, she spoils those she has close by like an adoptive aunt. I am interviewing her in the office at the National Theatre that she will leave at the end of this season, after six years. She has just arrived from one of the great milestones of her career, opening the season at the Comédie Française with a version ofThe Maids by Jean Genet, and soon she will begin rehearsing The Inn of the Three Camellias by Mercè Rodoreda, which she will bring to the Main Hall next month.

"If these songs have reached today, it is because they are bangers", declared Marc Heredia, composer and pianist of the Trio Fortuny. Agreed, they are bangers. But what the chamber trio has done with the voice of Judit Neddermann is the eighth wonder: they have recovered the songs that move us the most in the world, the traditional songs that our mother or grandmother sang to us when we were little –the stories of The heir Riera and of The spinner, the Gifted mountains and The sailor, compositions that have been gleaned from the Càntut archive, and have reinterpreted them through chamber music, with new arrangements and recompositions. The result is Edge, a jewel that next year will take the form of an album, but which is already a beautiful and exciting show, delicate and at the same time powerful, premiered Saturday evening at the Kursaal, in one of the climaxes of the Fira Mediterrània de Manresa, which has supported them as co-producers from its Obrador d’Arrel.

I acknowledge that it is contradictory to go cover for work the Biennial of Thought debate about why we live only to work, especially at half past eight in the evening, the time to put the kids to sleep or meet up with friends. But the fact is that two of the young essayists who have thought most about work, the philosopher Juan Evaristo Valls Boix and the journalist Anna Pacheco, were debating this Wednesday about the dangers of identifying with your trade, the trap of personal fulfillment, how work structures our lives and colonizes all spaces, and how it conditions our physical and mental health, but does not always improve our status. I was going for a friend, ahem.

A new international milestone for Eva Baltasar. Her penultimate novel, Ocàs i fascinació (Club Editor, 2024), is one of the nine titles shortlisted for the Médicis Étranger prize, one of the most prominent awards in the French literary scene, which is granted to the best translated novel of the year. In recent years it has been won by writers of international relevance such as Eduardo Halfon, Han Kang, Lidia Jorge, Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir, David Grossman, and Rachel Kushner. In 2003 it was won by the Barcelonan Enrique Vila-Matas, but since it was created in 1970, it has never been achieved by any author in Catalan. The only one who has been a finalist is Jaume Cabré, for the translation of Jo confesso, in 2013.

A study by Pompeu Fabra University that has analyzed the State's written press for ten years shows that the language discourses of conservative Spanish media "generate and perpetuate an image of negativization towards the Catalan language, because they link it to concepts such as closed-mindedness, radicalism, lack of freedom, lack of democracy, coercion and obligation," explains Dr. Vicent Climent Ferrando, professor in the translation department at UPF and one of the authors of the study together with Albert Morales.

Life is a mixture of lightness and gravity. Since the biography and academic life of Verónica Estay Stange are serious enough as it is, for her WhatsApp icon she likes to have a cheerful and dreamy photo, lying on the grass at a friend's house on the outskirts of Paris, where she lives and works as a professor of semiotics at the University of Paris Cité and at the Paris Institute of Political Studies. She is a co-founder of Disobedient Histories (a collective of children and relatives of those guilty of crimes against humanity during Latin American dictatorships) and is the real protagonist of the play No miris, which can be seen at the Biblioteca de Catalunya.

A sound artistic duo, a writer, a publishing house, a stage director, a musician, an actor, and a playwright are the winners of the 2026 National Culture Awards, the accolades that have been presented since 2009 by the National Council for Culture and the Arts (CoNCA). The winners are Cabosanroque, Pol Guasch, Jande Editorial, Àlex Ollé, Sílvia Pérez Cruz, Oriol Pla, and Victoria Szpunberg, as announced this Friday at an event held at the Pau Casals Auditorium in El Vendrell, coinciding with the 150th anniversary of Pau Casals. The ceremony was hosted by journalist Andrea Gumes and was attended by the President of the Generalitat, Salvador Illa, the Minister of Culture, Sònia Hernández Almodóvar, and the President of the CoNCA, Margarida Troguet. Each award comes with a prize of 20,000 euros, and starting this year, there are no longer five winners, but seven. In their acceptance speeches, the winners agreed on championing culture, collective values, and public services as tools to confront reactionary forces.

The first work, direct and challenging, already sets the tone for the exhibition. It is a large photograph by Antoni Muntadas of a Titanlux advertisement where one can read: "Painting is easy. Do it yourself!" It was 1989 and the Barcelona-born artist, provocatively, was already placing the artistic painter on the same level as the industrial painter to criticize the consumerist drift of society and pose a conflict: what will become of art when culture broadens its borders to the point of futility and the capacity for reproduction of art devalues the value of originality?

The Secondary School Teachers' union (aspepc·sps) has launched an offensive against "giving away" the advanced level Catalan certificate (the C1) when passing 4th year of ESO, at 16 years old. The campaign aims to collect signatures to break this automatic process, which they believe certifies students with an advanced level of language that they do not actually have.

The WhatsApp photo looks like his portrait, but in reality, it is the cover of the illustrated album that adapts the story about ambition How Much Land Does a Man Need?, by Tolstoy (Ediciones Ekaré). Eduard Sola has just debuted in the novel with El niu (La Campana / Ediciones B) and has already delivered the script for Casa en cendres, the sequel to the phenomenon Casa en flames, which earned him a Gaudí and a Goya. He has established himself as one of the most sought-after screenwriters in the national audiovisual industry (he is behind titles such as Ravalejar, La casa nostra, Mi amiga Eva, Querer, La virgen roja), but he says he still doesn't have a little boat or a house on the Costa Brava.