Until she turned thirty, Mar Márquez (Barcelona, 1981) only spoke Spanish. Despite being born and living in Catalonia, her entire environment communicated in that language, so for her Catalan was a foreign and distant language. But Márquez started working in a place where the working language was Catalan, and she began a relationship with a partner who also spoke it, so she made a decision: "I chose Catalan, I made it my chosen and beloved language. It was hard for me, but I stand by it. Since then, I write and think in Catalan," she states. The choice is even more significant because it was linked to her first steps as a future writer. Starting from classes at the Ateneu Barcelonès, Márquez began to craft the seed of her first novel, Amat Amat, which she has just published with Males Herbes. "I am a great defender of the language. Let's create culture in Catalan, please," Márquez demands.

We read that the short story The Woodsman's Snake (I translate freely, without ChatGPT), winner of a Commonwealth Foundation prize, written by Trinidad and Tobago author Jamir Nazir and published in the magazine Granta, is suspected of having been created with artificial intelligence.

Not every day do you have the luck to read a newly published book and have the certainty that you have a classic in your hands. This is what happened to me when I read Encara hi sou tots, by Liadan Ní Chuinn, published by La Segona Perifèria and translated into Catalan by Ariadna Pous. They are six extraordinary stories that explore the British colonial legacy in Northern Ireland. Both Irish and English critics already consider her one of the best voices of the generation after the Good Friday Peace Accords. From the person behind the pseudonym, Liadan Ní Chuinn, we only know that she was born in Northern Ireland in 1998, the year these agreements were signed. The name, however, is a declaration of intent: Liadan comes from the ancient Gaelic liath ("grey") and dan ("poet"), and it is the name of a 7th-century Irish poetess who fell in love with the poet Cuirithir, but who chose her vocation and her work and became a nun. NíChuinn is the feminine form of "daughter of Conn", high king of Ireland and legendary ancestor of the Gaelic dynasties. All in all, it would mean ancient poetess, daughter of Ireland. Ancient poetess, daughter of Ireland. Ní Chuinn, with the connivance of her publisher, has made no public appearances, the interviews she has given are written and no portrait of her circulates anywhere. The only contemporary precedent so deliberate was that of Elena Ferrante (until a more than bored journalist unmasked her).In Catalonia we have had milder versions of this same choice. Of Marta Rojals we know her real name and that she is an architect born in 1975 in La Palma d'Ebre, but she has always maintained a clear position: no photographs, no public appearances. Ada Klein writes under a pseudonym and in her debut we only knew she was a doctor, but she did not allow herself to be photographed or make public appearances so as not to mix profession and the literary world. With her second book she has relaxed this stance. Another different example would be that of Irene Solà, whose real face and name we do know, but who actively avoids media exposure, despite her success. These are three ways of trying to preserve something important from the noise.In an era of compulsive overexposure on social media, choosing absolute silence, as Ní Chuinn has done, is an act of freedom and self-esteem that I find admirable. It is only the work that speaks, and it does not need to exhibit the body or instagram one's own biography to achieve the easy dopamine of likes or external admiration and validation. It is surely a necessary gesture if one wants to write freely and truthfully because, let's be honest, addressing a national conflict in a colonizing state is not free anywhere. We know this well in Catalonia, where we have had politicians in prison and in exile. Read from here, then, Ní Chuinn's gesture reminds us that the freedom to write is never a guaranteed right, but a conquest for which each author must continue to fight, in their own way, every day.

"If you'll take one piece of advice, don't miss this book," he assured a few days ago Keret appears punctually on his computer screen in Tel Aviv, the city where he grew up and where he still lives and teaches creative writing. It's eleven in the morning, but he's been up for hours: he has a habit of going out at a quarter past seven to take a walk on the beach, which is ten minutes from his home. "I'm sorry I haven't been to Barcelona in so long. Maybe with the next book they'll invite me," he admits, before offering a small sample of his irony. "For now, with things the way they are in my country, it's normal for you to be afraid of someone like me coming."

The Ebrenc Litterarum Fair of Literary and Book Events will be held this year between May 28 and 31 in Móra d’Ebre, and will combine book presentations, exhibitions, and literary events. Since last year, the director of Litterarum has been Lluís-Xavier Flores, who has promoted the search for complicity throughout Catalan-speaking areas by opening sub-seats in other towns and cities, such as Morella, Calaceit, Tortosa, or Reus. “One of the challenges is to attract more programmers to the fair and for it to become again the fair of its beginnings, considered strategic by the Institution of Catalan Letters”, states Flores.

"Iberia resembles a bull's hide stretched from West to East in length, with the front parts facing East, and from North to South in width. It is approximately six thousand stadia in length; in width, in the widest band, it is about five thousand, although there are places below three thousand, especially in the Pyrenees, which are on the eastern side." These words serve as an introduction to the third book of the seventeen that make up the ambitious Geography of Strabo (c.63 BC–24 AD), focused on exploring the current Iberian Peninsula more than 2,000 years ago. The author delves into its main cities, temples, and rivers, but also into the peoples that inhabited it, among whom were the Astures, the Lusitanians, the Celtiberians, the Cerretani, and the Layetani. What did the ancient Greeks know about us? To what extent have we changed?

Black September, by Sandro Veronesi (Florence, 1959), is a coming-of-age novel, but above all it is a novel about the traumatic end of childhood. For the protagonist, Gigio Bellandi, son of an archetypically Italian criminal lawyer (a good guy with worldly vitality) and an exuberant Irish mother (fair-skinned and red-haired) with a much stronger character than she appears, the summer of 1972, which like every year he spent in a small town on the Tuscan coast with his parents and younger sister, marked a before and after in his life. He was twelve years old then, and now that he is sixty he remembers it in great detail. Not until the last pages will we know exactly what happened to him, but from the beginning we will be clear that that decisive summer represented for Gigio the best and the worst of life: the beginning of becoming a man through the fullness of reciprocal love and seeing how his whole small paradise world was shattered by the selfishness and weaknesses of the adults.Considering the plot materials it is made of, Setembre negre, translated into Catalan by Pau Vidal with the very vivid rigor he has accustomed us to, could have been a short novel –quick, agile, condensed and intense–, but it is noticeable that, in addition to telling a story, the author has also wanted to reconstruct a world and an era, that of his pre-adolescent Italy (sports idols, summer routines, musical discoveries), and for this reason the novel is long, detailed, with meanders, always lively but, at times, narratively ceremonial. This narrative and formal option may be a bit wordy in some passages, but in the long run it adds dramatic force to the climax. It also gives the work as a whole that sediment of humble but transcendent wisdom that springs from deeply examined and meticulously distilled experience.A man who remembers, a voice that tells

Two are the main virtues of Black September. The first is the tone of the narrative voice, evocative without nostalgic complacency, reflective in a passionate and robust way. It is a persuasive and warm voice that makes everything it explains interesting, whether it invents pastimes and sun-and-beach routines or reproduces cataclysmic conversations spied on in secret. It is the immense power of literature when it is, purely and simply, a character who remembers and a voice that tells. The second virtue is a gallery of memorable supporting characters: the well-matched marriage of the parents; Astel Raimondi, the girl with whom Gigio discovers the complete happiness of first love; Astel's parents; the anarchist uncle and his example of dignity and resistance; Gigio's discreet and wonderful little sister... They are supporting characters who complement and enrich the protagonist without ever being subordinate to him.In a novel in which for almost three hundred pages the revelation of an exceptionally dramatic event is announced and postponed, there is a risk of not satisfying expectations. This is not the case with Black September: the final revelation and the mix of subtlety and explosiveness with which Veronesi recounts it are admirable and totally effective. The lesson – let's call it a lesson – of it all, moreover, is wise and resonates with great force, and speaks to us, implicitly, of the fatal error of resentment and the heroic feat of forgiveness.

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Ghost Stories, by Siri Hustvedt (Northfield, 1955), is not just a book about loss: it is also a work written from the room that absence leaves when a shared life is broken forever, a book capable of making grief a habitable place. The love letter that is Ghost Stories reflects on the disappearance of love with the clarity of one who knows that pain cannot be tamed with grand gestures, but rather settles into the tiny crevices of everyday life: in an empty chair, in an interrupted sentence, in the unexpected weight of an object that once meant nothing and that, suddenly, becomes a relic. The title is of excellent precision: the ghosts that haunt these pages are not literary specters in the classic sense, but persistent presences of memory, reverberations of an intimacy that resists disappearing. The love for her husband, the writer Paul Auster (1947-2024), is not a memory embellished by art, but a living matter that continues to breathe within loss. The great virtue of the book is its ability to turn intimacy into a universal experience without losing a shred of uniqueness. Hustvedt writes from the wound, but she does so with emotional intelligence, thus avoiding the temptation of grandiloquence or gratuitous melodrama: "I feel Paul's voice". The author's prose, precise and profound, advances with serenity, and analyzes in detail the mechanisms of memory, the traps of recollection, the way the past bursts into the present with devastating force. Every page seems written with the awareness that remembering is, at the same time, an act of love and a condemnation. The presence of Paul Auster's unpublished writings adds a moving dimension, because they do not function as a mere editorial hook or a sentimental appendix, but as an organic extension of the narrative. The voice of the author of Leviathan emerges as a form of continuity that crosses the text and turns it into a posthumous dialogue, into an interrupted conversation resumed by literature. There is a very deep emotion in this inclusion: the feeling that writing is the last place where two lives can continue to find each other. It is also remarkable how Hustvedt reflects on identity when the loving bond disappears. Who are we when the other, who had helped us define ourselves, is no longer there? What remains of the self after annihilation? These questions run through the book like an underground current and give it a philosophical density that goes far beyond personal chronicle. Grief is not just the loss of a loved one; it is also the loss of a version of oneself, of shared time, of an intimate language built in two voices.A stunning, elegant, and profoundly human book

Ghost Stories is a work of painful beauty, the kind that doesn't just explain an experience, but makes it resonate within the reader. Hustvedt demonstrates that great literature is capable of entering the most vulnerable areas of existence without simplifying them. The author writes a book about grief, yes, but above all she gives us a book about the persistence of love, about memory as a form of resistance, and about the word as a space where the dead continue to speak with us. Striking, elegant, and profoundly human, it leaves a mark that is difficult to erase.Beyond the strictly autobiographical dimension, Ghost Stories also reads as a profound meditation on the very nature of literature. Hustvedt seems to ask what writing can do in the face of the irreparable. Literature does not console in an easy sense, it does not heal or restore what has been lost, but it does offer a verbal architecture where pain can take shape. Writing is a way of not letting oneself be swallowed by the void. Each sentence seems to be sustained by this tension between silence and the need to speak, between the abyss of loss and the urgency of giving it a grammar. Hustvedt has written a marvelous book that is at once an elegy, an emotional essay, and a piece of memory, with a narrative maturity worthy of the great voices who know that the word is the only possible form of survival.

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Amitav Ghosh (Calcutta, 1956), one of India's most important fiction writers, has for many years placed his pen at the service of climate activism. Ten years ago he published in English The great derangement: climate change and the unthinkable (now available in Spanish published by Capitán Swing with the title El gran delirio. Cambio climático y lo impensable). As he explained these days in the CCCB debates, Ghosh understands this "great derangement" as a collective disorder that makes us all incapable of assuming the gravity and reacting adequately to the climate emergency. An incapacity that he particularly denounces within literature.

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Like someone watching an animal documentary, I have observed with interest three things that have happened in recent months in the French literary market, a traditionally protectionist market that has managed to defend itself, in part, from Anglo-Saxon cultural colonizations and which, for this reason, I furiously envy.The first noteworthy news is that at the beginning of March this year it was announced that Amazon would be a "partner" of the Paris Book Fair; by partner they obviously meant that it would put a lot of money into it. For a while now, our neighbors have had a tug-of-war with Amazon: since 2023, a law has imposed a minimum shipping fee of three euros for book shipments (I read that Urtasun recently said they are studying doing something similar in our country). The fact is that Amazon interprets, very conveniently, that if the book is delivered to a locker, this fee does not need to be applied. The discussion is served, of course. That Amazon is a threat to bookstores is nothing new (I agree with what Oriol Soler said recently on this, although thinking that Amazon is our only problem seems reductive and a bit misleading); what is new is that following the announcement of Amazon's sponsorship, the French Booksellers Association decided to stand up and withdraw from the Fair on the grounds that Amazon has predatory and hegemonic aspirations that are a danger to everyone in the sector: authors, publishers, and booksellers. I am pleased to see the fighting spirit of the French and I wonder what would happen if this had taken place in our country. I get the impression that we would have swallowed it whole, because we are always short on audacity and full of fears, and perhaps also because the links in our system are weaker than the French ones. The fact is that following the controversy, Amazon decided to withdraw from the Book Fair. Sometimes, standing up yields results: let's tattoo it on ourselves so we don't forget it.The second noteworthy fact is that this year the Paris Fair has not counted on the main imprints of Hachette, which I would say is the French publisher with the largest market share (similar or higher than that of the Planeta group in Spain, if AI does not deceive me). Not only has it not gone, but it set up a small alternative festival on its own during the month of March. This confirms that we must not only fear the big international groups but also the national ones, as the predatory and hegemonic will affects us all. The controversy at Grasset publishing house

The third event that interested me is what happened with the Grasset imprint, which is precisely one of Hachette's most important. There they publish (they used to publish) authors like Virginie Despentes, Vanessa Springora, Sorj Chalandon, Bernard-Henri Lévy or Pascal Bruckner; they and 110 more authors made public an open letter in Libération announcing that, following the dismissal of Olivier Nora (the historic editor of Grasset for twenty-six years), they would no longer sign with Grasset. 115 authors, oh my god!, and another fifty have since joined the protest. I am almost convinced that the authors from here would have resigned ourselves to it and moved on, although, of course, in private we would have complained to exhaustion: that's how we are, in private we say everything (praise and blame) but in public we keep quiet like no one else. All of Grasset's mess has its trigger in the owner, Vincent Bolloré, a magnate who with his millions dedicates himself to promoting far-right ideas, for example, through Europe 1, the most important private radio in France which – oh, what a coincidence – decided to buy shortly before the French elections. We can already imagine that the billionaire has not ruffled a single hair over the departure of this hundred or so authors who consider Nora's departure an "unacceptable attack on editorial independence and creative freedom" and who refuse to "be hostages of an ideological war that seeks to impose authoritarianism on culture and the media"; Bolloré has not been moved because we can deduce that literature, in fact, doesn't give a damn about it. All of this is, without a doubt, very sad and discouraging news. And what do we do with all this? On the one hand, we should look at it closely and follow it with attention, because as that saying goes about the neighbor's beard, perhaps we should start soaking ours. On the other hand, it would be advisable to become aware that keeping quiet and swallowing is not always the best strategy, that resistance is sometimes not only necessary but also useful, that the collective has a strength that the individual does not have, etcetera. Well, perhaps it would be useless and it would be better to stay on the couch sprawled out watching documentaries, because there are plenty for all tastes: in some the zebra always succumbs to the lion, in others a buffalo charges a predator with a horn thrust, and in some there are even fish that join together forming a swirl to confuse and save themselves from the worst of their predators.

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One of the most admirable achievements of Catalan playwrights in exile is their persistence in continuing to write theatre, despite knowing almost for certain that they would never see it performed in Catalonia. Ambrosi Carrion (Sant Gervasi de Cassoles, 1888–Cornellà de Conflent, 1973) was one of its foremost exponents. With about fifteen unpublished stage texts, Carrion also cultivated poetry and essay writing and built a literary career of over 30 works. Despite this, only one of his plays written in exile has been performed in Catalonia –La dama de Reus (Teatre Nacional de Catalunya, 2008)– and his name has remained in the shadows for decades. With the intention of making him present and vindicating him, Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona has published Teatre inèdit de l'exili, a volume containing three unpublished works by Carrion, prepared by professors Josep Camps Arbós and Francesc Foguet Boreu.

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Even with the memory of having lived "the unforgettable experience" of her first Sant Jordi, Audur Ava Ólafsdóttir (Reykjavik, 1958) strolls through the garden of Club Editor, the publishing house that has already published three of her unclassifiable novels, where an unwavering faith in the human race shines. Accustomed to the volcanic landscape of Iceland, Ólafsdóttir cannot help but marvel at the ease with which trees and flowers of all kinds grow in southern Europe, the setting of her best-known novel, Rosa candida –available in some thirty languages–, until now unpublished in Catalan, translated by Macià Riutort, as well as La veritat sobre la llum and Edèn, with which she won the Llibreter prize 2025.

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For a long time, Gil Pratsobrerroca (Vic, 1996) dreamed that he wanted to be a writer without knowing if he would succeed. "I've always loved writing a lot, since I was little. In school I entered the Sant Jordi contests and then it became a hobby. When I have a free afternoon, I often start writing. It's a process that relaxes me: I don't have to fight with anyone and I make all the decisions," explains the writer, who with El joc del silenci (La Campana) has become one of the big winners of this Sant Jordi. The thriller, with which he debuted in September, has been the second best-selling Catalan fiction book of the Diada behind Regina Rodríguez Sirvent, who has triumphed with Crispetes de matinada, from the same publisher, and who three years ago had a similar journey with her first book, Les calces al sol.

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Dear Regi, I should be angry, envious, and resentful of you for many reasons. Your book Les calces al sol (La campana) and my Un cor de neu (La Magrana) were released together in September 2022, and yours, slowly but surely, succeeded, and mine, well, it didn't. And this is despite yours being the first book you published, not like me who has published a few. On top of that, you're quite a bit younger than me. And a good person. And talented and wonderful and hardworking and persistent. And stylish! According to the manual for a good follower of the patriarchal cliché, I should choke every time I read something about you. But the opposite happens to me.

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The definitive impulse to start writing, a self-confidence therapy, the stimulus to tell that story that is kept in a corner of the soul or a creative activity for an active retirement. The students of the Vicenç Pagès Jordà Writing Room of the Girona City Council are as diverse and heterogeneous as the motivations that have led them to want to write. But all of them, despite their different origins, ages or abilities, are touched by the same passion for writing. And for reading! Since the founder of the school, the late writer from Figueres Vicenç Pagès, did not conceive of one activity without the other.

]]> This Saturday I had the good fortune to see in Lloret de Mar I count every step I take on the ground, a monologue that Lluïsa Cunillé wrote especially for the actor Oriol Genís, directed by Xavier Albertí. The play is of a delicacy that we only find at the highest levels of art, performed by three top personalities of Catalan theatre. I am very grateful for the idea of a Xavier Albertí cycle in Lloret, his city, and I hope more towns would program theatre with this ambition.Now that it is Saint George's Day, few people will buy theatre books, even though theatre is perhaps, together with poetry, also little sold, the most rigorous form of literature. What can we do if culture (which in Latin means cultivation) involves burying and watering a seed that is not seen but is there, and with much more life inside than the plants already grown and ready to be consumed. Theatre has given us tragedy, the most essential form of human consciousness.And, therefore, few people will buy, and I'm sorry, a recent book from Arola Editors (an editorial harmed by the scandal of denied subsidies for Catalan books, but with an impressive catalog, of incalculable importance for our theatre),  Ansietats teatrals reunides, by Esteve Miralles.

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The dragon is one of the quintessential fantastic animals in the history of literature. Its power has fascinated millions of readers, young and old, spurred by the creativity of novelists and poets from all over, but the image it presents has been changing: the dragon can be menacing, dangerous, and violent, although also, on some occasions, benign and compassionate, and can even possess a wisdom superior to that of humans. "I am fire. I am death," proclaims Smaug, the imposing and fearsome dragon with whom Bilbo Baggins must verbally contend in The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien. "Never give up, and sooner or later you will find good luck," recommends Fuixur, the majestic white dragon, to the intrepid Atreyu in The Neverending Story, by Michael Ende. For Ursula K. Le Guin, who expanded and renewed the abilities of these enigmatic animals in the Earthsea novel cycle, dragons represent the human capacity to imagine: "If dragons frighten us it is because we tend to consider the works of imagination as suspicious or even despicable," the author defended in the article Why, as Americans, are we afraid of dragons? (1974).

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Can we live with our dead present without them tormenting us, especially considering that some as significant as the older sister or father have committed suicide? This is one of the driving questions of A Truce That Is Not Peace, the new book by Miriam Toews (Steinbach, 1964), published in Catalan by Les Hores, translated by Octavi Gil Pujol. In the hands of many writers, the autobiographical material she unfolds would be mired in the swamp of traumas. The Canadian author, however, knows how to combine sadness and longing with a surprising sense of humor. She can just as easily rescue an anecdote from the Mennonite Christian community where she grew up as recall a funny family episode from the past – such as the robbery in Ecuador –, mention a book that has recently interested her, and draw the reader into her current reality: the author has had a small house built on the property where her mother, one of her daughters, her partner, and their two children live.

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“Salvador Espriu Castelló, writer, single, sixty years old, a native of Santa Coloma de Farners [...]. He declares that he in no way wishes to be buried in the cemetery of Arenys de Mar. He further declares his express wish that his body be cremated, if the laws permit”. These are verbatim words, handwritten by Salvador Espriu in what is a document of last wishes, a draft of a will, written at some point between the summer of 1973 and that of 1974 – he was born on July 10, 1913 –, drafted in Spanish – the law did not provide for any other option – and addressed to his great friend and lawyer Josep Ferrer i Rius.

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For Sant Jordi, there is life beyond the best-selling books, publishing phenomena, and circumstantial trends. You just need to take a stroll through a well-run bookstore to verify that the good health of the Catalan publishing sector lies in the explosive diversity of proposals and in the quality and demand of many of these proposals. We choose just ten that we believe would be worth reaching more readers.

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