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.

The Project, Halley Records and Oques Grasses have decided to postpone the Osona band's first farewell concert from this Monday to Thursday. They announced it through social media at 2 PM, to avoid travel for the numerous people who intended to attend from outside of Barcelona, where mobility problems continue in various locations. Thus, the series of events for The last concert of Oques Grasses at the Lluís Companys Olympic Stadium will begin on Wednesday.

We are still digesting the excitement of the best Catalan Book Week in history and it is already time to turn the page. If at the Lluís Companys promenade there was partying, camaraderie, public and Catalan, at the international Liber fair there is business, meetings, international agents, Spanish and English. Coffee replaces beer, I guess. This week it is taking place in L'Hospitalet de Llobregat, at the Fair, the main meeting point for the country's publishing industry, which the Federation of Publishers' Guilds of Spain holds one year here and the next in Madrid. It is where the people with the money are.

The WhatsApp profile picture is misleading: Olga Gavaldà never hangs up her coat, meaning she never turns off her work phone. When she was 11 years old, she suffered a car accident and spent a lot of time hospitalized. There, she became absolutely clear that nursing would be her vocation. What she didn't know is that she would spend her entire career at the hospital where she was born by cesarean section. For 35 years, she has been part of the transplant team at Vall d'Hebron, the leading center in Catalonia with 387 interventions in 2025 and a benchmark in the country. She is in charge of coordinating a fast-paced mechanism.

Granted that the Eixample is full of streets dedicated to the exploits of the soldiers of the Crown of Aragon –from Calabria to Sardinia and from Corsica to Aragon–, but if today a taxi driver is looking for Almogavars, they shouldn't head towards Razzmatazz but towards the Arc de Triomf, at the Catalan Book Week. This is what the Valencian sociolinguist Toni Mollà says, who presents The languages of tomorrow (Bromera) on a crowded afternoon of La Mercè dedicated to Catalan. "Surely those of us here are staunch Almogavars, but there are global linguistic uses that we should take into account when designing official and non-official linguistic policies," he warns. He argues that Catalan will only be a language of tomorrow if it moves out of the school and folkloric environment and adapts to what is structural: capitalism, globalization, and algorithms. This is in addition to maintaining the individual linguistic loyalty of speakers.

Awards always catch Oriol Pla working. This Wednesday at noon, while he was at the San Sebastián Festival presenting the film Esta soledad, by Javier Giner (Yo, adicto), the actor received a call from the Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasun, to tell him that he has been awarded the National Theater Prize, which is granted by the Ministry of Culture and is endowed with 30,000 euros.

Fifty years ago, the doors of the Teatre Lliure were opened by those "crazy snipers who confuse theatre with a personal adventure," as defined by Fabià Puigserver, the soul of the project. The Palau Robert is hosting a unique commemorative exhibition until January 17th. Instead of a canonical retrospective made of objects, photographs, and costumes, they have invited the spectator to "look at the stage from a different place," says director Julio Manrique, defending the house motto, A free theatre. It is an invitation to enter the bowels of the stage through five theatrical installations created by five regular set designers of the Lliure who are from different generations.

He wants to explain economics in jeans and the photo on his phone doesn't lie: informal, on a trip to Morocco ten years ago. He never wears a tie and doesn't have LinkedIn either. He studied economics because he listened to Fabià Estapé on TV3 and now he uses economics to explain day-to-day decisions. He is an associate professor at UPF and UVic-UCC, founder of the Kapital platform (which has 23,000 subscribers on Substack and 30,000 listeners on Spotify) and author of Fuck you money (Península).

Catalan is residual in the sports and leisure activities of young people in Barcelona. Only 11% of conversations between young people are exclusively in Catalan and 76% are exclusively in Spanish (the remaining 13% are bilingual uses), according to a pilot study conducted by the Institute for Catalan Studies (IEC) on the use of Catalan in 14 municipal sports and leisure entities in the capital. In contrast, the percentages flip when it comes to conversation between instructors: 32% of instructors converse exclusively in Spanish among themselves, but the majority, 68%, speak in Catalan.

"Hilària is a festival that can only be held in Catalonia and with Catalans in mind," states its director, Oriol de Balanzó. It has been ten years since Cruïlla began a comedy cycle infiltrated into its musical programming, and it has been two years since the comedians have been walking on their own, under the umbrella of Hilària. This year, nine shows will be offered with more than thirty guest artists who –due to the closing of El Molino– are distributed across various spaces in the city. Observing the lineup, there is no doubt that it is designed by and for Catalans: they have set up a duel of comedians titled Barcelona vs. Regions, they will hold a roast of El Foraster, and they will offer a late night show hosted by Joel Díaz with a single guest, who will be Lluís Gavaldà. Thus, we finally have a self-centered comedy scene. But what does that mean? What makes us Catalans laugh?

If Clara Segura, Marta Marco, and Cristina Genebat read fragments at a book presentation, you've got half the work done: they can already add a pile to the stall and take out the card reader, because we'll be heading to the checkout. The three musketeers of Catalan theater have unsheathed their swords in the little garden of La Central to present —all for one and one for all— the new novel by one of them: Cristina Genebat debuts with Sorra (La Magrana), which won the Lo Somni prize at the Night of Catalan Letters.

One of the headlines left this Thursday by the Roger Español case trial has to do with the interpreters who were in the courtroom, unable to translate the lawyers' questions from Catalan to Spanish. The lawyers for the private and popular accusations, exercised by Irídia, Òmnium and the ANC, ended up self-translating or questioning the police directly in Spanish after up to two interpreters could not do their job, a fact that the entities have denounced for "violation of linguistic rights". But how could this situation have occurred?

I located him by calling the landline at the rectory of Santa Margarida de Montbui. We discover together what photo he has on his mobile phone, because he didn't remember: it is the celebration of his 50 years as a priest. "I know a little about religion and language, but I don't know anything about modernity". After a life dedicated to three pillars, "the poor, the language and a vision of the Gospel", this September he will leave the parish of Sant Maure, near Igualada, and will serve only as rector of the old town, with 650 inhabitants. We meet, "if there is nofuneral", before going to officiate a mass at a home

The journalist Albert Om (Taradell, 1966) immerses himself once again in the memories of a time, of a country, in his memoir Què dirà la gent (Univers). If in El dia que vaig marxar he explained his parents' end, now he goes to the beginning of the story: to his repressed republican grandparents; to his parents' marriage, which renounced politics but achieved well-being, and to a childhood shaping its national spirit with Llach, Serrat, and La Trinca. The result is a politico-emotional portrait of an entire generation, and an approach to Catalan identity made with the very genuine language he imbibed, of course, in Taradell.

Barcelona City Council has never inspected or sanctioned any business for failing to comply with regulations regarding the Catalan language. Although the Consumer Code dates back to 2010 and the linguistic policy law dates back to 1998, in all these years the council has never sanctioned any company for not labeling shops in Catalan, not serving in Catalan, or not offering the menu in Catalan to customers, despite the fact that non-compliance is evident on the streets and in the city's businesses. Why? Although city councils have inspection and sanctioning powers, until now, Barcelona's inspectors had not taken language into account in their actions. The law recognizes the customer's right to be served in Catalan, and also to receive communications (signage, invoices, menus, instructions, advertising) at least in Catalan.

Manel Dueso, actor, director, playwright, and poet with an extensive and prestigious theatrical curriculum, has died this Tuesday at the age of 73 as a result of cancer. He performed and directed more than a hundred plays by authors such as Shakespeare, Chekhov –his great predilection–, Molière, and Beckett, among many others, and wrote more than twenty plays, a production that validates him as a first-rate stage animal. As an actor, he was a well-known face thanks to such popular series as La Riera, Nit i dia, Cuéntame, Isabel, El cor de la ciutat, Secrets de família and Laberint d'ombres, and in cinema he worked under the direction of directors such as Jaume Balagueró (Mientras duermes) and Manuel Huerga (Salvador).