"In a complicated, hostile moment with little hopeful news, this year we want to reclaim the act of celebrating," says the director of Fira Tàrrega, Anna Giribet. The event, one of the most relevant in the world of performing arts in Catalonia, will take place from September 10th to 13th and will host almost sixty shows by established artists and emerging talents. We have chosen 10 that focus on the theme of this 46th edition: the party and the gathering.

The story of Tania Head struck North American society in the early 2000s, when Americans were just recovering after the September 11, 2001 attacks against the Twin Towers of New York and the Pentagon. For years, Head posed as a survivor of the attack, appeared publicly on numerous occasions explaining the false story of her trauma, led guided tours of New York's ground zero, and even became president of the World Trade Center Survivors' Network, the association of attack survivors. In 2007, an investigative report by The New York Times revealed that everything Head had explained was a lie: she neither worked in the Twin Towers, nor had a husband who had died in the attack, nor had she been rescued by a man with a red scarf. After that revelation, Tania Head disappeared.

Isabel Olesti's latest book (Reus, 1957), Les dones i les ombres (Proa), is not a historical novel, nor a memoir, nor a war novel. And, despite this, the story takes place between the 1930s and 1940s in Catalonia, starts from family memories, and is profoundly marked by the Civil War. Olesti's mother lived through the conflict sheltered in a farmhouse in Baix Camp, along with her parents and sisters, and surrounded by a group of people who, at first, did not know each other at all. Many years after those experiences, the writer – author of books such as El marit invisible (Columna, 1999) and La pell de l'aigua (Proa, 2012) – has transformed them into a fictional story starring two families who coexist in a forced daily life, between uncertainty, fear, and desire.

It was after a conversation with her eldest son that Ester Invernon (Mataró, 1973) decided to put all her eggs in the literature basket. "He had arrived home angry with the world, totally pre-teen, and I told him: 'Many days I don't like what I do and I put up with it,'" explains Invernon. That night she couldn't stop thinking about the phrase and, the next morning, while having breakfast, she announced to her family that she had decided to change her life. "I told them that in a year I would publish a book and I got to work on it," she recalls. Thus began the career of a writer who has already brought five novels to life – including Un estiu per estimar (La Campana, 2021) and Ningú ens va dir que seria fàcil (La Campana, 2023) – and has sold over 20,000 books. Her latest story, titled Després de tu, has now arrived in bookstores, and is disconnected from the Trilogia dels Albons which has established Invernon as a successful author in Catalan.

The Ukrainian Viktor Ishchuk (1983) says that practically all his memories, including childhood ones, are tied to classical dance. For years, Ishchuk was a soloist with the National Opera of Kyiv Ballet and, since 2011, has served as director of the Kyiv Ballet. "In 35 years, every day of my life has revolved around dance and, especially, Swan Lake. It is the most famous work in the world of classical ballet, and it is inexhaustible," says the choreographer and dancer from the foyer of the Tivoli Theatre. It is Monday, August 17th in the afternoon and the hall on Casp street has just reopened after the holiday break. Technicians and hall staff are preparing for the first show of the season, Swan Lake by the Kyiv Ballet, which will be shown from this Tuesday until August 30th.

Elsa Anka (Barcelona, 1965) was one of the most well-known faces on television in the 90s, when she co-hosted programs like Human beings with Mikimoto and Out balls to TV3 and The Great Game of the Goose to Telecinco accompanied by Andrés Caparrós. Three decades later, Anka has left the media frontline behind and no longer occupies the prime time as before. The presenter reoriented her career in the early 2000s; she decided to leave television and focus on public relations, a sector she had already worked in before her screen debut. She currently works as the head of communication for the IM Clinic aesthetic surgery clinic. Anka has also served as an ambassador for autorenting for Banco Sabadell, an image job that she has combined with her activity as a public relations officer.

"This book is born out of a bleat, but we don't want to dwell on lament either," says writer and journalist Mar Camps (Palamós, 1991) in the first pages of Don't come to the village to rest (Edicions de la Ela Geminada, 2026). After seeing and experiencing firsthand how the villages of Empordà were subordinated to tourism and the proliferation of second homes, Camps decided to pour everything surrounding this issue into a short essay, less than 150 pages, sharp and full of insights. "I wanted to deliver a punch to the table to say that what is sold from the city about villages doesn't fit what I perceive," explains Camps. The book focuses mainly on the municipalities of the Ter River Plain (Bordils, Celrà, Cervià de Ter, Flaçà, Juià, Madremanya, Sant Joan de Mollet, Sant Jordi Desvalls, Sant Martí Vell, Viladasens, and Medinyà) to provide a radiography of their transformation in recent years. However, the reflections and ideas she pours into it are extensible to many other places in Catalonia.

Until very recently, the literary world and the world of video games were two parallel universes that barely touched each other, beyond some adaptation of a novel turned into a game. But in recent years, the publishing market has seen the birth and growth of a new genre that has moved from the margins to become a mass phenomenon. Dubbed LitRPG (the acronym stands for literary role playing game, in English), this trend brings together novels that use the tools of video games to advance the story. Characters have a health bar that decreases with enemy attacks, and as the plot progresses and they level up, they gain skill points that are recorded in the novel and acquire new weapons to face their opponents. They are essentially adventure books, full of challenges for their protagonists and designed for reader entertainment, but which at the same time delve into social and political issues of our present.

The writer Pere Pena (Seròs, 1962) was investigating a few years ago the death of his great-uncle during the Civil War when he came across the disappearance of a teacher from Seròs, Candelària Ametlla. From that mystery, Pena began to craft the story of his first novel, Sota la pell, un arbre (Eclecta), which reconstructs Candelària's life by mixing reality and fiction. The author begins with his sentimental awakening to link the teacher's figure with Rita, a French girl who spent her summers in the village. He does this through interviews with war witnesses and relatives of exiles, in a polyhedral narrative that is also made up of his thoughts to end up drawing a literary mosaic of the collective memory of a village.

The actress Rosa Boladeras (Terrassa, 1972) explains that she discovered the book Nothing (Comanegra, 2012) by the Danish writer Janne Teller by chance. "I went to one of my two go-to bookstores, La Temerària in Terrassa, and I found it there. It's a very simple book, but it caught my attention when I saw that it had been initially banned in Denmark, Germany, and Norway when it was published, in 2000," says Boladeras. What most attracted her to the story of the title is that "over the years, it went from being banned to becoming required reading," emphasizes the actress, who this July received the Margarida Xirgu award for her performance in the show I Have a Forest in My Brain at Sala Beckett.

A while ago, actress Júlia Bonjoch had to spend a few days in the hospital. To make her stay more bearable, she brought one of the books she had pending: Tomorrow, tomorrow and tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin, published in Catalan by Periscopi in 2023. "The story begins, precisely, with one of the protagonists in the hospital. Since I was also admitted, it caught my attention," explains the actress, who this summer was at the Poliorama Theatre with the show The trout and in September, he will return to do his season. Bonjoch connected "immediately" with the story starring Sam and Sadie, two children born in the 80s who share a passion for video games. Over 500 pages, Zevin links the lives of the two main characters from childhood to maturity, in a deeply emotional novel that, since its publication, has captivated thousands of readers.

Amanda Knox has just premiered her monologue Cartwheel, and has already stirred up controversy. The comedian, convicted of murdering her roommate Meredith Kercher in 2007 in Perugia and later acquitted, represents until August 17 a comedy show stand-up to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, one of the most prominent theatrical events of the summer in Europe. In the show, which has sold out all tickets, Knox recounts her years in prison through humor. The initiative has not pleased Kercher's family, who consider that it trivializes violence and has collected over 40,000 signatures so that they cancel it. However, the Fringe has said in a statement reported by The Guardian which will keep it on display and that "he is not afraid of controversy".

The actor Dafnis Balduz has a close connection with literature and, at times, has merged it with his vocation – for example, last year, when he turned Édouard Louis' most celebrated book into a show–. As he doesn't set up walls between the two, he is very clear about which book he wants to recommend for the summer: the debut novel by director and playwright Francesc Cuéllar, with whom Balduz worked last year alongside Míriam Iscla, in the show Honestedat. "I could tell you many books that have marked me, but one of the most recent I've read and enjoyed is Everyone wants to be Joseph Conrad's son", says Balduz, who until a few days ago was performing the play Newton's First Law at La Villarroel, where he plays an early professor with rather innovative ideas.

Perhaps because they conceived it as a game during one of the toughest recent times, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic lockdown, playwrights and directors Sergi Belbel and Roc Esquius wrote a long-running comedy and one of the most celebrated recent successes at Sala Versus Glòries. Angle mort premiered in 2021 and the audience soon showed their enthusiasm. The play won the Teatre Barcelona award for best proximity show and was reprogrammed, year after year, at the Barcelona venue. This August it is in its fifth season, with performances until September 13.

To explore the impact of the tradwives phenomenon and bring its consequences to the table, American writer Caro Claire Burke published the novel Yesteryear in 2024, which quickly achieved massive success in the United States. The book arrived in Spanish this year courtesy of AdN publishing house and, in parallel, an audiovisual adaptation is being made starring Anne Hathaway. Mallorcan writer Laura Gost has recently read it and has been fascinated by it. "I went into it thinking it would be something superficial and very stereotypical, but it's much deeper than you might think," says Gost.

"These days I am rereading the first attempt at a biography of Josep Maria de Sagarra (1894-1961). Unfortunately, our country still does not have a proper biography of the writer," explains the theater director Xavier Albertí. The book that has him captivated and that he recommends is Sagarra, seen by his intimates (Edhasa, 1982), which the journalist Lluís Permanyer (1939-2025) published four decades ago based on testimonies from people in the writer's closest circle. "Lluís Permanyer passed away recently, and I think we need to re-evaluate the work of documenting his personal relationship with Sagarra and everything he tells us about it. It is an essential book for understanding Sagarra's figure and work, and at the same time, for dispelling a great number of prejudices that this man carries with him," claims Albertí, who this summer has presented two shows at the Dansàneu festival.

Little did Laura Autonell (Taradell, 1963) imagine when she started writing, convinced that her vocation would not extend beyond her immediate circle, that she would have to eat her words. "At the time, I thought: 'Which publisher will want me, if I have no literary career and I'm 62 years old?'", explains the writer. The path her second novel, The Bookstore of Dead Hours (Columna), has taken has shattered all her preconceptions. The book was published in May and quickly became one of the top 10 best-selling fiction titles in Catalonia. It hasn't left the list since. Columna has reissued it and put more than 5,000 copies into circulation, which have moved through the publishing market, mainly thanks to word-of-mouth.

When it comes to choosing a lead writer, actress Anna Sahun doesn't hesitate for a moment: the Frenchman Emmanuel Carrère is one of the indispensable names in her library since she discovered him with L'adversari (Anagrama), originally published over twenty years ago. "It's a quick read, a very thin book, but you can't put it down," emphasizes the performer, who recalls discovering the French writer through her husband, actor and director Joel Joan. In L'adversari, which was adapted for the theatre in 2022, Carrère narrates the story of Jean-Claude Romand, a man who maintained a double life for eighteen years and who murdered his wife, children, and parents and attempted suicide when the truth was about to come out.

Until the 2010s, Fermí Casado was primarily an actor recognized for his work in series such as Estació d'enllaç, Mar de fons, and El cor de la ciutat. He rose to fame by playing the character of Tomàs, the fictional son of Àngels Poch and Josep Maria Pou in that popular TV3 fiction set in a Barcelona train station. From then on, Casado continued to string together theater performances and television projects, through which he built a solid acting career alongside directors such as Mario Gas, Sergi Belbel, Joan Lluís Bozzo, and Roser Batalla.

Rosa Boladeras (Terrassa, 1972) is an actress driven by passion. Enthusiasm led her to make the stage her vocation at a young age, and since then, she has built a very long career made up of shows and television projects that have made her one of the most outstanding performers in our country. After being away from theater for seven years to dedicate herself to municipal politics, at the Terrassa City Council, Boladeras is now experiencing one of the most recognized moments of her professional career thanks to the Margarida Xirgu award, which she received on Monday at the Teatre Romea for her work in the show she received on Monday at the Teatre Romea for her work in the show I Have a Forest in My Brain, by Guadalupe Sáez and directed by Alícia Gorina at Sala Beckett.