He hasn't reached 30 yet and Roc Bernadí (Barcelona, 1997) has already made a name for himself on the Catalan scene. As an actor, he has starred in large-scale musicals and, as a musician, he is half of the duo Svetlana, who will be back on tour this summer and will release a new album in 2027. We meet at Sala Beckett, a few streets from where he grew up. Until May 24th, he will be there performing his first monologue, Hold me until I fall asleep, an intimate and poetic coming of age written by Cesc Colomina and directed by Guillem Sánchez Garcia. Afterwards, he will be part of the dream team for The Threepenny Opera directed by Marta Pazos to premiere the Grec Festival and inaugurate the season at the Teatre Lliure.

I imagined that bookstores after Sant Jordi would be an oasis of peace and literature, and I find them to be a whirlwind of boxes and delivery notes. "For us, Sant Jordi ends in June," Xevi Cortacans, owner of La Muntanya de Llibres in Vic, tells me, a name that has a literal meaning these days. Sendak bookstore also has a pile of boxes ready to return to distributors, with the invented books from the festival. "We return as many books as we sold for Sant Jordi," says Èric del Arco, partner of Documenta and president of the Booksellers' Guild. He opens the spreadsheets. "We sold 3,251 books during the week and returned 3,200. We had to buy 6,400 books to sell half of them." Of course, they didn't just dispatch new releases, but mainly sold books from their backlist, which he estimates to be 13,000 copies. Of the three thousand books sold, two thousand were different titles. Only of 22 titles did they sell more than ten copies, so 95% are titles that do not appear in the rankings.

The queues for Sant Jordi once again served as a good thermometer to realize that the success of young adult literature is not only a reality but a growing phenomenon. Generation Z is rejuvenating the reading public. The figures from the Publishers' Guild confirm this year after year: 75% of young people between 14 and 24 years old read in their free time. And one of the most prominent names in Spanish romantic novels is that of Joana Marcús from Mallorca, who has just published Els ecos de la Jude (Montena), her first unpublished novel.

When she was 6 years old, teacher Maryam El Hamidi (Tangier, 1994) experienced firsthand the ordeal her students have recently gone through. With her mother and sister, they came to live in Castelló d’Empúries to reunite with her father in the year 2000. "In the schools where I have worked, they see me as a mirror. Especially women, they see a role model. Perhaps I haven't gone through the same circumstances as them, but I know their needs. I give them confidence and motivation. If the road is long, I make it shorter," assures El Hamidi.

Eight months ago, all this was unthinkable: publishing a novel, that it would have readers, that it would have so many readers that it has been on the bestseller list in the State for 34 weeks, discovering Sant Jordi and doing so as a writer who signs. Two months ago, Lucía Solla Sobral (Marín, Pontevedra, 1989) took a leave of absence from her job at a technology start-up because the unexpected success of Comerás flores (Libros del Asteroide) has meant she can only sleep at home two or three days a week. Working between shifts in hotels was already unsustainable. The day after Sant Jordi, she took a flight back to Oviedo, where she lives, and this Saturday, to Argentina.

A conversation with Professor Joan Alberich (Reus, 1944) is an endless outpouring of knowledge and curiosities. He is a professor of secondary school Greek, a university professor, a member of the Bernat Metge Foundation, and a translator of various works in Greek, from Homer to Marcus Aurelius – he currently has one of Pausanias' travel books in hand. We talk about languages and civilizations and jump through the centuries following the trail of Greek on the occasion of the publication of the second revised edition of the Greek-Catalan Dictionary from Enciclopèdia Catalana, a fundamental pillar of Western culture in our language, which Alberich and Francesc J. Cuartero have directed and co-written, with several authors.

Five years have passed since the publication of Torno a casa (Proa) and it has been a time of great changes and revelations for Joan Carreras (Barcelona, 1962), after a chaotic and sad personal phase, with two traumatic breakups. "For the first time in my life I did something I had never done: asked for help," he confesses. The psychologist diagnosed him with ADHD with high abilities, a condition he had controlled over the years but suffering its consequences, such as obsessive behaviors and depression. "The diagnosis was a brutal shock, but as I got to know the symptomatology, everything started to fit. It's as if I had always been hitting myself in the face, in the body, in the knee, and suddenly someone turned on the light in the room and I could see that there was an open drawer, or the closet door, and that's why it hurt. I wish I had been diagnosed at 30, or at 20 years old; not only for myself, but for them, and for the journalists I've related to and who found me a bit strange," he reflects.

Sant Jordi changes its route in Barcelona. This year it will extend from Gran de Gràcia to the Plaça de la Catedral in Barcelona. There will be nearly three continuous kilometers of book and rose stalls to celebrate the most massive Diada in the history of the capital. As the ARA advanced, the works on La Rambla will force a modification of the iconic route of the Diada, so it has been decided to lengthen the natural route of Passeig de Gràcia and extend the stalls through Plaça de Catalunya, Portal de l'Àngel, Plaça Nova and up to Via Laietana, passing in front of the Cathedral. It is a new axis and, in principle, temporary, although it could also be consolidated to spread out the stalls next year. "Sant Jordi is alive and adapts to realities," says Eric del Arco, president of the booksellers, who believes it is "an opportunity".

Last Saturday, 13,068 people took the written test to obtain the higher-level Catalan certificate (C2), the official accreditation that teachers, various grades of civil servants, and language professionals need to practice their work. The surprise, for some examinees, was that after taking a break they were able to review the first part of the exam, which assesses reading comprehension and written expression, accounts for 57% of the grade, and has been eliminatory for a few editions. Vilaweb has collected complaints from some users because they consider it an irregularity that lowers the exam's requirements and gives an advantage to the examinees.

The Teatre Regina building is for sale. The owning company is negotiating with one of the great Catalan producers, El Mago Pop, who already owns the Teatre Victòria, and is interested in this property on Carrer Sèneca, next to the Jardinets de Gràcia, which has a theatre for 350 spectators on the ground floor. This was announced by La Vanguardia and has been confirmed in a statement by the magician Antonio Díaz's agency, which states that the negotiations are in their initial stages.

The linguistic emergency is not solely a Catalan concern. According to the UN, a language disappears worldwide every two weeks, and 40% of the world's population does not have access to education in their own language. In this context, an initiative is being promoted from Catalonia that aims to contribute to saving linguistic diversity and protecting linguistic rights. CIEMEN and PEN Català have relaunched a new Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights that will update the one presented to UNESCO 30 years ago. The objective is to take advantage of the window of opportunity that opens with the commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 2028.

"It seems like everyone is going to a communion," observed Laia gracefully, from the queue for Rosalía's concert in Barcelona. It could also be an Ibiza party. White, long skirts, rosaries, and pearls prevail in the queues to enter the Palau Sant Jordi. The first concert being on a Monday makes everything calmer. There have been no camped fans, nor much stress: here the youngest are university students. The first in line is Ingrid, 28, who arrived at 7 in the morning from Zaragoza with three friends and in no way expected to have the number 1 painted with a marker in her hand. "Everything Rosalía does is art. She puts a lot of passion into it. She's my favorite artist. It's just that, even if you don't like her style, the music is really worth it," she defends.

As with epic adventures, it all started with a simple whatsapp: "I've had an idea," Pau Emili Muñoz wrote to four friends. He came from the activism of Joves de Mallorca per la Llengua and wanted to make it bigger. "We are tired of having to defend the language from the trenches, because we keep retreating a little. Taking the initiative is more exhausting but more rewarding. It's time to take a step forward," he argues.

"What peace," says the mayor Jaume Collboni, as he enters the Documenta bookstore in Barcelona this Friday morning. Documenta bookstore in Barcelona. The Barcelona City Council has announced the first support plan for bookstores, fifteen days before Sant Jordi. The global allocation of the measure is 850,000 euros for 2026, and it is expected to continue. The mayor has been clear and direct: "Buy in bookstores, don't buy on Amazon. By buying in a small bookstore you are doing more than buying a book, you are defending a model of the city, a way of relating and that the profits stay in the neighborhood. We defend the right to stay in our neighborhoods and we help people like booksellers, our neighbors, friends, people like Èric, and not a man who has yachts sailing the Mediterranean," said Collboni. His words may recall those of Anne Hidalgo, then mayor of Paris, who said during the pandemic so that bookstores could reopen.

"What peace," says mayor Jaume Collboni, entering the Documenta bookstore in Barcelona this Friday morning. Documenta bookstore in Barcelona. The Barcelona City Council has announced the first support plan for bookstores, fifteen days before Sant Jordi. The global allocation for the measure is 850,000 euros for 2026, and it is expected to have continuity. The mayor has been clear and unambiguous: "Buy in bookstores, don't buy on Amazon. By buying in a small bookstore you are doing more than buying a book, you are defending a model of city, a way of relating and that the profits stay in the neighborhood. We defend the right to stay in the neighborhoods and we help people like booksellers, our neighbors, friends, people like Èric, and not a man who has yachts sailing the Mediterranean," said Collboni. His words may recall those of Anne Hidalgo, then mayor of Paris, who said during the pandemic for bookstores to be able to reopen.

Justice is one of the black spots of the language: only 14% of judges have a basic level of Catalan. This not only means that, by default, the linguistic choice of users in the courts is not respected, but also that the sentences written in Catalan are minimal, less than 7%, according to the radiography of Catalan in justice made public in 2022. The figures have never moved from the minimums. According to the latest Linguistic Uses Survey of 2023, only 25% used Catalan in justice bodies, the lowest percentage of all public administrations.

After walking through Catalonia, the monologue Crida als ocells de colors llampants —still on tour—, the communicator and humorist Òscar Andreu (Terrassa, 1975) turns that linguistic manifesto into Manual de defensa del català (Univers), a small book about practicing, understanding, and extending good linguistic habits. The co-director of La competència on RAC 1 and presenter of l'Està passant on TV3 explains his linguistic autobiography, a striptease that will make more than one blush.

It is not applicable. This is the official response that this Tuesday the Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasun, gave to the PNB regarding the temporary transfer of the Guernica to the Basque Country, which the Vitoria government has formally requested on the occasion of the 90th anniversary of the first Basque executive and the bombing of Gernika. "My duty as minister is to guarantee access to culture, but at the same time to preserve heritage," Urtasun replied to a question from PNB senator Igotz López, closing the door to transporting the painting to the Guggenheim in Bilbao because technicians from the Reina Sofía museum advise against it. A transfer that in any case would only be for half a year: the executive's request is to have it from October 1, 2026, to June 30, 2027.

In the first quarter of the year, Marc Artigau (Barcelona, 1984) donned the playwright's hat and premiered the comedy about Alzheimer's Una festa a Roma, directed by Clara Segura at the Teatre Lliure. In the second quarter, for Sant Jordi, the playwright puts on the narrator's hat and presents the collection of short stories Aquest serà el nostre pou (Empúries), which has just won the Mercè Rodoreda prize at the Catalan Letters Night.

There is only one essay that can bring together a handful of Baroque nuns, the Kardashians, the Me Too movement, the Holy Inquisition, TikTok, lesbian love, and academic life in Providence, Rhode Island, on the same pages. Instrucción de novicias (Blackie Books) is the first popular essay by Doctors in Hispanic Literature Ana Garriga and Carmen Urbita, the creators of the successful podcast Las Hijas de Felipe, and it has been an editorial phenomenon even before its publication.