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.

Pau Casals' echo is international, but it is not widely known that his brother Enric also contributed to his success. "He was Pau Casals' technical soul. He was the one who orchestrated and also acted as his manager, friend, and assistant director," points out stage director Xavier Albertí. In alliance with writer Jordi Lara, they have created a show about the relationship between the two Casals brothers and their ways of experiencing success. The play is titled "Les barques volen pel cel" and premieres on Saturday at the Church of Santa Maria d'Àneu, as part of the Dansàneu festival. Later, in December, it will also be performed at the Palau de la Música.

The last time the Russian writer Artem Mozgovoy (Kemerovo, 1985) left his mother's house, he destroyed all his childhood and youth diaries. "I didn't want to leave them and I couldn't take them with me. It was very sad, because all those notebooks contained my loves and heartbreaks, the good and bad things I had experienced up to then," explains Mozgovoy. Paradoxically, that gesture would give birth some time later to his first novel, Spring in Siberia, which was originally published in English in 2023 and has now arrived in bookstores in Catalan from Comanegra with a translation by Jordi Martín Lloret. Once settled in another country, when he already felt "safe, a new man", Mozgovoy began to dig into his memory.

The Barcelona-born writer Luis Goytisolo, the last member of a lineage of writers who renewed contemporary Spanish narrative, died on Sunday at the age of 91 in his rural retreat in Vimbodí, in Conca de Barberà, as reported on Monday at midnight the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE), an institution of which he had been an academic since 1995. Goytisolo is the author of an extensive literary work characterized by his capacity for innovation both formally and narratively. One of his most celebrated literary projects is the monumental tetralogy "}Antagonism –formed by the volumes Count, The green of May to the sea, The wrath of Achilles and Theory of knowledge–, which spans from the Civil War to late Francoism and which represented a literary milestone for the narrative of the 70s and 80s. His constant search for new literary territories earned him the National Prize for Spanish Literature in 2013 and recognitions such as the National Literature Prize in 1993 for "Statues with pigeons.

South Korea has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, with 29.1 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, according to 2025 data. South Korean director Jinyeob Lee wanted to bring this issue to the stage and decided to do so by drawing inspiration from one of the country's most deeply rooted traditional practices: that of the female divers of Jeju Island, who practice free-diving to collect seafood. Starting from the diving technique, Lee devised the show "Muljil", which she has performed with the company Elephants Laugh and which will be shown this Wednesday and Thursday at the Teatre Lliure, as part of the Grec festival. The play places four cubicles filled with water on stage. In each, an performer is submerged with the water up to their nose.