Perhaps because he won the last Jocs Florals prize with the book Descripció del món (Godall), Martí Sales (Barcelona, 1979) meets us in the garden of the Muñoz Ramonet Foundation, an oasis of trees, plants, and sculptural fountains that opened to the public ten years ago. A poet, narrator, translator, and singer – he was part of the fondly remembered Surfing Sirles – Sales received the prestigious award at the Saló de Cent of Barcelona City Council, where he took the opportunity to hand out leaflets to attendees in case they wanted to collaborate financially "with the struggle of the Vallcarca neighborhood against gentrification" and so that some residents could "wipe out the disproportionate fines from the police persecution to which the current council subjects them, while saying that the most important axis of its program is the right to housing".

Manuel Arjona, one of the four founders of the dance, glam and electronic pop music groupLocomía, has died suddenly in Viladecans, the city where he had lived for a long time, at the age of 58. "Today Manuel's light has risen to heaven, but his memory lives on with us," assured Luis Font, a group mate, on Instagram, along with Xavier Font – his brother – and Gard Passchier.

The Iliad which has just published Adesiara, one of the young publishing houses that has persistently bet on new translations of Greek and Latin classics -Hesiod, Lucian of Samosata, Euripides, Sallust, Plautus, Ovid and a long etcetera- is special for many reasons.

"In this solitary environment, in this infinite desert today populated by men of all the world's lineages, we Catalans also arrive, in the thousands (...) We leave Barcelona without being aware of what we are leaving or what we will find upon arrival... and the arrival at the great city of La Plata is sad... for the emigrant." These words summarize the deep longing felt, for years, by Enric Martí i Muntaner (Vilanova i la Geltrú, 1889-Buenos Aires, 1954): although he left for Argentina at the beginning of the 20th century with the aim of making his fortune, he only managed to survive in the middle of the Pampa for almost three decades, and guided by love for his country – and, above all, for his language – he undertook the verse translation of an emblematic poem by José Hernández, Martín Fierro (1872), which he managed to publish in 1936, after several vicissitudes.

The life of the economist, politician, and writer Antoni Vives (Barcelona, 1965) took a radical turn when, in 2018, he landed in Saudi Arabia to meet with the country's prince, Mohammed bin Salman, and the team with which he was preparing Vision 2030, which was to translate into the urbanization of a region in the middle of the desert "the size of Belgium" called Neom – which integrates the words new and future– to build "a city designed for nine million inhabitants" in the middle of the desert. He has now decided to explain the seven years he spent leading that mammoth project in a memoir literary and very interesting, In the secret country (Pòrtic, 2026), which does not hide the contradictions of an absolute monarchy guided by Sharia, capable of having a journalist critical of the regime murdered and dismembered as Jamal Khashoggi and which, at the same time, has the aspiration to modernize itself. Vives's own trajectory will surprise more than one reader. In addition to winning the Crexells prize with Farringdon Road's Dream (La Magrana, 2011) and the Bookseller with And tomorrow, paradise (RBA, 2014), has been deputy mayor for Urbanism between 2011 and 2015 at Barcelona City Council —during Xavier Trias's last term— and in 2022 was sentenced to two years in prison, settled with a compensation of 155,000 euros, for irregular contracting of the then mayor of Santa Coloma de Cervelló, Jesús Arévalo, by the entity Barcelona Regional, which Vives had chaired.

Up to now, and for almost thirty years, we have known Josep Pedrals (Barcelona, 1979) as a poet, a performer, a lecturer, and a cultural manager. With Poeticismes (Arcàdia, 2026), he debuts as an essayist with the same combination of pleasantness, erudition, and humor that abounds in his verses. In the catch-all drawer that is Pedrals' new book, we find reflections on emperors buried in honey or on the monument to Jacint Verdaguer on Passeig de Sant Joan, chronicles of some of the thousands of recitals in which he has participated around the world —like the one that took him to Macedonia accompanied by Adam Zagajewski—, vindications of authors less known to readers than they should be, and a wealth of curious technical speculations on poetry writing, one of his great passions, along with omnivorous reading and a love for the stage.

Que morin els fills dels altres, the second novel by Roser Cabré-Verdiell (Barcelona, 1982), has won the 55th Crexells Prize, awarded annually by the Ateneu Barcelonès and endowed with 6,000 euros. "It is a singular story, which shakes the family institution right from the title, impactful and enigmatic, and which is written in a forceful and lyrical prose that transports the reader through a world that moves in ambiguity," highlights the jury, made up of Lluïsa Julià, Xavier Aliaga, Francesco Ardolino, Montserrat Palau, Xènia Dyakonova, and Eva Piquer.

The Fundació Prudenci Bertrana has made public the four literary awards it presents annually: the Prudenci Bertrana novel award has gone to Fer cantar els arbres, by Jordi Campoy; the Miquel de Palol poetry award to Horografia, by Joan Tomàs Martínez Grimalt; the Carles Rahola essay award to Terra de Quixots, by Joan Manuel Soldevilla, and the Ramon Muntaner youth novel award, finally, has been won by La fuga, by Laia Aguilar.

More often than not, it is small accidents and coincidences that end up yielding exceptional literary fruits. This is how the story that has led to the first Catalan translation of The Lives by Giorgio Vasari (Arezzo, 1511 - Florence, 1574) begins: every summer, the Valencian lawyer Martí Domínguez Pérez would take his family to Italy, where they would combine leisure with visits to museums and churches. "It was in 1979, while we were in Arezzo, that my father, a great lover of Italian culture, stopped at the window of a small bookstore where they had the nine volumes of the Sansoni edition of The Lives, where Vasari was written in huge letters, as if he were a rock star. My father hesitated whether or not to buy that edition, which cost 20,000 pesetas. It was a significant amount of money at the time," recalls his son, the writer and biologist Martí Domínguez i Romero, author of novels such as Mater (Proa, 2022) and essays such as The Dream of Lucretius (Pòrtic, 2013).

"Like a happy castaway, / in October twenty-six, / the thirtieth day, Ramon arrives in the world, / in Barcelona. / Without making much fuss. He is the ninth child". This is how the ballad dedicated by Joan Vilamala to Ramon Folch i Camarasa (1926-2019) begins, one of the key authors of the literary revival in Catalan that started in the late 1950s, alongside Manuel de Pedrolo, Maria Aurèlia Capmany, and Josep Maria Espinàs.

For 46 years, the Sant Joan prize has recognized narrative work —fiction or otherwise— and throughout this almost half-century of history, it has recognized authors with long careers such as Vicenç Villatoro, Maria de la Pau Janer, Baltasar Porcel and Carme Riera, but it has also discovered, especially recently, voices such as those of Àlvar Caixal, Alba Gómez Gabriel and Aida Sunyol. Convened by the Fundació Antigues Caixes Catalanes and BBVA and endowed with 35,000 euros, the prize has been split into two categories this year and, without initial intention, has incorporated two new voices into the Catalan literary system, Jordi Marrón and Laura Pallarés.

"Sing to me, Muse, of the man of many wiles who wandered far and wide, / after he sacked the holy city of Troy." This is how the new Catalan version of the begins.

On October 23, 1969, the telephone rang in the room of the Tunisian hotel where Samuel Beckett and his partner, Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil, were on vacation. She answered, and a spokesperson for the Swedish Academy informed her that her husband, the author of such acclaimed plays as Waiting for Godot (1952) and Endgame (1955), had just won the Nobel Prize in Literature. "What a catastrophe!" he exclaimed. With these two words, he summarized the discomfort with which Beckett lived the award: he did not go to Stockholm to collect it, he did not keep the financial compensation, nor did he allow himself to write anything for a good while, until the world had managed to forget that his work had deserved such a prestigious distinction.

In the novels and stories of the Argentine Patricio Pron (Rosario, 1975) nothing is simple or obvious, but readers who delve into them will find a sophistication, both in form and content, that will reward them handsomely. In En todo hay una grieta y por ella entra la luz (Anagrama, 2026), the life of the poet, filmmaker, and artist Benjamin Fondane (1898-1944) motivates the initial two-page paragraph, but Pron immediately dynamites his plans: the rest of the novel is a succession of notes and footnotes that cover the year the writer himself spent in New York and stimulate reflections on climate change, gentrification, the rise of authoritarian discourses, contemporary art, and romantic relationships.

For decades, Biel Mesquida (Castelló de la Plana, 1947) has been inviting readers to delve into all the nuances of the "censored perfume" of freedom, whether sexual or political. On the evening he received the 58th Premi d'Honor de les Lletres Catalanes, the verses of Lluita de classes, one of the agile and radiant poems from El bell país on els homes desitgen els homes –written in 1974 but unpublished until 1985–, once again resonated at the Palau de la Música with the elegant diction of the poet Adrià Targa. "You are a creature, fierce creature, playing with my hips, / biting them, while I knelt, pushed and compelled by your frenzy and / this desire to sink into the beautiful hole of my anus": thus, the urgent connection between the lyrical self and the "disheveled boy" of the commissions still sounds forcefully, an oasis of free love amidst the national-Catholic and Francoist darkness.

Fundació Enciclopèdia Catalana has announced that it is beginning a new phase two and a half years after going through a delicate moment, which resulted in a reduction of staff through an employment regulation file (ERO) to dismiss 15 people. After managing to overcome the latest crisis, and coinciding with its sixtieth anniversary, the editorial conglomerate has made public its new business strategy, which bets "on education, on knowledge in Catalan (also in digital environments) and on the international projection of the catalog".

"Due to a family emergency, Rosalía has to postpone her upcoming concerts in Miami and Orlando", promoter Live Nation communicated this Thursday. The singer was scheduled to perform this Thursday and Saturday at Miami's Kaseya Center and next Monday at Orlando's Kia Center.

"I am alive. My husband, Paul Auster, is dead." Thus begins Ghost Stories (Edicions 62 / Seix Barral, 2026; translated by Jordi Martín Lloret), the memoir that Siri Hustvedt (Minnesota, 1955) has needed to write after the "horrible years" that followed the diagnosis of lung cancer in the author of The New York Trilogy and Leviathan. The volume reconstructs the 43 years of relationship between Siri and Paul in chapters that advance and retreat in time to show the difficult moment the author was going through. Hustvedt's urgent yet reflective narrative combines with the last texts Auster wrote, a series of letters intended so that his grandson Miles –born months before the writer's death– can one day know what kind of family he has grown up in.

Singer Dua Lipa married actor Callum Turner this Sunday in London in a ceremony attended only by family and eight of the couple's closest friends.

Colm Tóibín (Enniscorthy, 1955), to be able to say his piece about Mercè Rodoreda –an author he has been reading for decades–, has found a gap in his extremely tight schedule and has crossed the Atlantic Ocean from Los Angeles. The author of novels such as Brooklyn and The Magician –both in Catalan from the Amsterdam publishing house– has been the last guest of the exhibitionRodoreda, a forest, which closed its doors a few days ago at the CCCB. 81,880 people have visited it since December, a milestone that has made it the seventh most visited exhibition in the history of the Barcelona venue and the most successful one focused on literature, surpassing those programmed for Claudio Magris, Salvador Espriu and W.G. Sebald.