The first thing that comes to my mind after reading this eloquent 800-page volume is a question: how is it that the lyrical work of Segimon Serrallonga (Torelló, 1930 - Badalona, 2002) has lived hidden for so long? We knew, of course, some of his accomplishments, but the majority of these poems remained to be discovered. The impression that the work now produces on us is staggering, although it is true that it contains pieces of extremely high lyricism and others of intention –though not of writing– that are rather more rugged.

It is enough to talk for a short while with Ferran Torrent (Sedaví, 1951) to realize that he not only has a very rich collection of anecdotes—personal adventures and misadventures of all kinds, literary and political gossip, a colorful macedonia of human typologies seen up close—but that, furthermore, he unfolds and recounts them with an infallible grace. One day that we had gone to one of those pre-Sant Jordi days that publishing houses organize so that their authors try to sign books in bookstores in large cities near Barcelona, I spent two hours with him in a car—Màrius Serra was driving, Gemma Ventura was also there—and I bombarded him with questions. It is impossible to recount all the laughing we did with Torrent's answers and stories. Before the journey ended, I asked him how it was possible that no one had ever proposed making a book of conversations with him. Torrent replied that they had indeed proposed it to him, and by journalists he respected a lot, but that he kept putting them off. In the end, it seems that the journalist and writer Salvador Ortells Miralles (Sueca, 1977) has managed to convince him. It is good news.

With her first book, Contra la nostàlgia, Maria Canelles Trabal drew rare critical unanimity. Her emotional sophistication, narrative maturity, and range of themes related to femininity (sex, motherhood, family ties...) treated from an original point of view were celebrated therein. For Si fos una sibil·la, her second novel, I augur a similar reception. Canelles, certainly, has a vigorous narrative capacity and knows how to build worlds simply sustained by the word. Because that is what her characters do, talk and talk, and when they do not speak, the narrator speaks for them. This powerful verbal edifice is convincing and makes for pleasant reading.

Four of the pillars of the poetry of Jaume Pont i Ibáñez (Lleida, 1947-2026) have been love, madness, chance, and death. Having died this Thursday at the age of 79, Pont, who held a degree in philosophy and letters, made a name for himself with Límit(s) in 1976, published by the emblematic Llibres del Mall, and not long after he founded and directed the influential magazine Quaderns de Ponent (1979-1983), which helped to disseminate and critically value the work of creators from the Terres de Lleida such as Maria-Mercè Marçal,, Josep Maria Sala-Valldaura, and Pere Rovira.

There are experiences that do not allow for a rational explanation, memories that distort when we try to retrieve them, ideas that appear without asking for permission. Reality has this bad manners: it refuses to be ordered. In Life is not mathematics (La Magrana), Joan Miquel Oliver (Sóller, 1974) turns this impossibility of squaring the world into a literary principle. The seventy-seven micro-stories transit between anecdote, reflection, memory, and the absurd, without submitting to narrative conventions. Because disorder can also have a form.

Not long ago, the English writer Robert Macfarlane, a true authority on nature non-fiction, published a book titled Underland (Angle), in which he proposed the possibility, studied by him and by other writers and environmental activists, of treating the elements of nature as living beings and, therefore, opening an infinite field of new questions and possibilities: what should this treatment be like? Do they have rights and duties? Can we protect them with laws, as we do with vulnerable groups? They certainly have a birth, and a death, and they have been on Earth for several millennia, long before us as a species.

I was once told that when Carles Capdevila, the driving force behind this newspaper, saw on a CV that someone had sung in a choir, he valued it positively, because it meant that, on one hand, they knew how to work for the common good of the group and, on the other, they knew how to project their own voice. I don't know if it is entirely true, but I remembered this anecdote as soon as I started reading Una catalana a París. Articles d’exili, a collection of articles by Teresa Pàmies which has been edited by Montserrat Bacardí and published by Comanegra.

Aina Fullana Llull (Manacor, 1997) published her first novel, Els dies bons, in 2021. That text was already striking and literarily remarkable. It was a family story. The father, a drug addict since adolescence, finds a little peace in his marriage. The mother, less sociable than the father, bears the marital disturbance in silence until she can take no more and divorces. It will be the daughter, finally, upon whom the mission of reconstructing the family memory will fall. This daughter first takes refuge in a too-idealized conception of love and then in a spiral of promiscuous self-destruction. Peace will only come when she can make peace with her father and discover the expiatory and transformative power of literature. When I grow up I want to be a house is the logical, moral, and literary continuation of that troubled, dissonant, and sharp family world from the previous book, The Good Days. Here too we find a protagonist, Emma, with an absent father (this time without addictions) and a mother who doesn't quite get along very well with her daughter. Sober, precise and powerful

Emma has a psychotic episode and must be admitted to a psychiatric hospital. A part of the novel takes place there. It is her world that unfolds throughout the pages of the story, her passion for painting, the difficulty in relating to others (and to herself), the longing for the affection her grandparents gave her, the great shipwreck of love (with men and with women). If there is one thing When I grow up I want to be a house has, it is a powerful literary language (attentive to the heartbeat of colloquial Mallorcan) and a way of narrating with sobriety and precision. A poetic style that starts from simplicity to suggest depths of interest: “At sea, when it rains, you only hear the water baptizing the water. The thunder gets confused with the waves that hit the rocks and from afar you do not know if they are waves or thunder. The world turns black with water. Then there is nothing but the world turned to water; it just rains. I would like to be the sea, when it rains”.Emma, who if she could have chosen would have opted “not to be born” (like Cioran), feels nostalgia for “a future in which looking back is pleasant”. And the fact is that her life is difficult to bear, but also the backdrop against which it unfolds –the irreversible transformation of Mallorca into a fake setting for tourists– has another point of anguish and bitterness.It is difficult to empathize with the protagonist of such a story. But there is no doubt that Emma, as a character, is vivid and plausible. The author can be very satisfied with her creation.

The solid, versatile and successful literary journey of Ramon Solsona (Barcelona, 1950) has been recognized this year with the 30th Trajectòria award from the Setmana del Llibre en Català, which will be held at the Passeig Lluís Companys in Barcelona from September 18 to 27. The author of Les hores detingudes (Quaderns Crema, 1993), L'home de la maleta (Proa, 2011) and Allò que va passar a Cardós (Proa, 2016) will collect the award and take stock of his creative life in one of the central events of the fair and literary festival on September 23, at 7 p.m.

The writer Sebastià Alzamora (Llucmajor, 1972) has been awarded the National Poetry Prize, which is granted by the Ministry of Culture and is endowed with 30,000 euros. The jury has chosen his work Sala Augusta seguit de Llengua materna (Proa, 2025) for "its ability to transition, with identical genius, from the impassioned language of historical denunciation to the delicacy of domestic space". They also highlight that in this collection of poems, which is an evocation of Alzamora's memory, the author "weaves together with mastery collective history and family intimacy". "They called me shortly before lunch, while I was working on my new novel from home, in Llucmajor –comments the Majorcan author and ARA columnist by phone–. I picked up because I thought it would be about work, but I could not have expected it to be María José Gálvez, the Director General for Books of the Ministry of Culture. She informed me of the jury's deliberations, which had just concluded".

The robust, flexible, and young voice of Irene Solà (Malla, 1990) has won over thousands of readers around the world in less than a decade, and is currently one of the most translated and beloved authors in Catalan literature. The meteoric and still rising trajectory of the writer from Osona might lead the most malicious minds to think of a pact with the devil to gain such unusual repercussions. Solà has managed to have When I Sing and the Mountain Dances (Anagrama, 2019) translated into 23 languages and has garnered awards such as the Anagrama Novel Prize, the European Union Prize for Literature, and the Nota Bene Prize. Before this great success, which included a theatrical adaptation and even a symphonic work, Solà had already received the Documenta Prize for The Dikes (L'Altra, 2017) and the Amadeu Oller Prize for Beast (Galerada, 2012), her only collection of poems, which Anagrama has just reissued.

In Teoria de gèneres, the second book by Josep Girós (Tarragona, 1968), the architect and writer focuses on a temptation as old as the human being: to classify what they do not understand. Literature does not escape this either: novel, poetry, essay, thriller, autobiography, science fiction... Genres, subgenres, labels or compartments that promise to guide us before opening a book and that, often, only serve to tell us what we should expect from them. Girós writes precisely against this need to put everything in its place. The author plays with the very idea of classifying until it wavers. And he does so with a paradox that runs throughout the book: he plays at classifying while questioning classification. Instead of accepting the academic divisions of genres, he proposes his own view, deliberately eccentric, and turns literary taxonomy into a playground. The book does not seek to resolve what a novel, a poem, or an essay is, but rather to ask why knowing it calms us. Classifying a book is also domesticating it: anticipating it, reducing its mystery. Girós seems to suspect that literature begins to lose something just at the moment we believe we have understood it. Theory of genres moves away from the solemn literary essay, the kind that seems to demand that the reader maintain a certain gravity even when talking about books. Here, there is no desire to build a definitive system or to erect a new Bible of classification. The proposal is more interesting when it resists being turned into doctrine. And here one of its best weapons appears: humor. Not as an ornament, but as a way of thinking. Girós uses the joke to dismantle the formality with which we often speak of literature and culture, this ridiculous need to turn any reading experience into an operation of prestige. Leave room for error and surprise

Theory of genres is less a manual than a provocation. It does not offer a compass so that the reader does not get lost, but rather suggests a much more uncomfortable idea: perhaps getting lost is, in fact, the best way to read. The paradox is delightful: to rebel against classifications, Girós must manufacture others (unfinished narratives, admirably incomprehensible narratives, narratives translated more than once into Catalan, etc.). The game also has rules, but these do not intend to imprison literature, but rather to demonstrate that every border is provisional, artificial, and revisable.This awareness saves Gender Theory from becoming a mere catalog of eccentricities. Beneath the game lies a deeper question: what happens when we stop reading to confirm what we already knew? In an era in which algorithms increasingly decide what we read, leaving room for error and surprise is almost an act of resistance. Josep Girós does not ask us to abandon genres, but rather not to turn them into borders. The most vibrant literature has always been a bit of a smuggler: it enters territories that do not belong to it, mixes registers, steals forms, and disobeys the labels that try to contain it. After all, the book starts from an apparently modest question and ends up touching on an essential issue: to what extent do we need to order the world to be able to inhabit it? Girós responds with a proposal that prefers the crack to the wall, curiosity to certainty, and disorder to the tranquility of having everything classified. Perhaps reading does not consist of knowing which shelf we should put a book on. Perhaps it consists of taking it off the shelf and seeing what happens.

Although the humility and shyness that have always accompanied him make it difficult for him to express himself with much expansiveness, Maria Barbal (Tremp, 1949) is happy to have, since this September, a literary biography like the one dedicated to her by Carme Arenas (Granollers, 1954), Words for silence (Column). "Carme took an interest in my writing from very early on, and I am grateful to her that it was so. In the end, I ended up becoming one of the sources of documentation for her book —she admits with a minimal smile—. Although at first I resisted the project a little, I must recognize that I have ended up drawing benefits from it. It has helped me to become aware of the trajectory I have had, and also to remember from which people I come".

"Dear Mercè: it has been a long time since we heard from you. What are you doing? Where are you? How are you? [...] As you can see I am [sic] in La Molina where I am taking a rest cure of chilling". This is the postcard that the painter and pedagogue Susina Amat i Juvé (Barcelona, 1912-1983) sent on July 20, 1971, from the Catalan Pyrenees, to Mercè Rodoreda (Barcelona, 1908 - Girona, 1983), whom she had become friends with when they worked at the Propaganda Commissariat of the Generalitat, in the middle of the Civil War. The author, who at that time was finalizing one of her most emblematic novels, Broken mirror (1974), he replied to her from Vienna three weeks later to let her know about the difficult time he was going through: "I have been [sic] in Vienna for about four months, where a person very dear to me is dying little by little after a couple of brain surgeries".

Year after year, the Week of Catalan Books is growing in every sense. In 2025, sales figures climbed to a record 820,000 euros – 15% more than the previous edition – it received more than 100,000 visitors and occupied 8,900 m², with 94 stands, 312 exhibitors, and the presence of 265 publishing houses from all Catalan-speaking territories. This year, the venue on Passeig Lluís Companys in Barcelona — a location the Week reclaimed during the America's Cup year, due to the sporting competition which prevented it from being held at Moll de la Fusta — will expand to 9,000 m², will feature 98 stands, 332 exhibitors, and 282 publishing houses.

"Yes: in my second year of ESO I started / speaking Spanish / because the Catalans didn't get it / and because, as Sylvia Plath said, / every woman adores a fascist", writes Maria Sevilla Paris (Badalona, 1990) in one of the poems in Sylvia Plath, / every woman adores a fascist", writes Maria Sevilla Paris (Badalona, 1990) in one of the poems in Ni una o l'oposada flor (Arrebato Libros). On the left pages we read the original poems in Catalan. On the right, the Spanish version, which often becomes a transformative game, by Juan Andrés García Román and the author. Ni una o l'oposada flor explains, in a ductile and precise language, Sevilla's devotion to animals, plants, and all sorts of living organisms –including men–, while at the same time reflecting on her relationship with Catalan, which, although not the language her parents spoke to each other, has become her usual language, a professional tool – she is an associate professor at the University of Barcelona and runs workshops at the Casal dels Infants in Raval – and a vehicle for artistic expression, which has so far resulted in half a dozen books, including Dents de polpa (AdiA edicions, 2015), Plastilina (Fonoll, 2021), and La nit ovípara (Documents Documenta, 2024).

For many current Catalan writers, shit is everything. I mean they call it that - generically, shit–, of the different kinds of shit there are in the world, as if it were all the same, either because they have no roots in the countryside (only shadows on the asphalt) or because they have not read enough (or at all) of their own literary tradition. Ramon Erra (Vic, 1966) is a rigorous writer, who has read well (and enough) and who has deep roots in the land. He knows that chicken manure is called hen, and for horse manure, there is only one name: we make. May the guano is the excrementitious matter of bats. It is not bullshit, what I say! Language is the raw material of the writer. Erra also knows what a piss-a-bed is, a wild cock (and he has even seen some!) and a drain – which he writes load, as it should be pronounced in their native region–, and knows how to distinguish between a wheat field and stubble.

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.

This summer, which many of us have seen fires ravage our forests and where we don't know for sure if what we are experiencing is nature becoming unbalanced or, on the contrary, doing its best to rebalance itself; this summer Editorial Barcino has published a new edition of Liliana, by Apel·les Mestres (Barcelona, 1854-1936), and has given us the opportunity to re-evaluate a writer whom we should all know better. Personally, I would swear I had never read anything by him, although I had seen illustrations by him at the MNAC. I delved into his life a few months ago, when I was preparing the script for a podcast about classic authors that I present, La contracoberta. And since then I have been amazed not only by his pen, but also by everything he knew how to do well: drawing, painting, writing poetry, theatre, prose and music, translating and giving graphic illustration the artistic category it deserves.

The victory of Spanish fascism in the civil war, the consequent Francoist dictatorship, and the continuity that, on identity and linguistic-cultural issues, has been given from so-called democratic institutions to Spanish nationalism with Francoist echoes, make it so that when we read the books and review the figure and life trajectory of Avel·lí Artís Gener “Tísner” or Vicenç Riera Llorca (Barcelona, 1903–Pineda de Mar, 1991) they seem to us of heroic and purest radicalism and coherence. Is it because we have put them on a pedestal or because we have objectively let ourselves be lowered?A staunch Catalanist and socialist of popular extraction and republican convictions, Riera Llorca, who declared himself a Catalan nationalist and therefore (not despite it: therefore) also an internationalist, made his name as a writer in the rich breeding ground of Catalan journalism during the years of the Republic. A polyglot and voracious reader, he dedicated himself to trade unionism and went to fight voluntarily at the front. After the republican defeat and the military occupation of Catalonia, Riera Llorca fled to France, where he was interned twice in concentration camps, from which he escaped both times. From there, he managed to flee to the Dominican Republic, and then to Mexico, where he co-founded and directed the most mythical and fertile exile magazine, Pont blau. He returned to Catalonia in 1969. The country had been deformed, Riera Llorca had not, and he continued to defend the same ideas he had before he had to leave. I have extracted this information from the very interesting study Vicenç Riera Llorca. Exile, memory and the working class, by Albert Ventura (Publicacions Universitat Rovira i Virgili).A chaotic, indolent and precarious world

The best-known title by Riera Llorca, Tots tres surten per l’Ozama, published in Mexico in 1946, now reissued by Club Editor, is a testimonial novel, between historical chronicle, journalistic reportage and expressively frontal and refined narration, about the experience of Catalan exile in the Dominican Republic of dictator Trujillo. Applying tones, perspectives, and technical lessons learned from reading the Americans Hemingway and Dos Passos, then very popular, Riera Llorca offers an exhaustive panorama, full of ellipses and not at all prolix but socio-anthropologically incisive, colorful and insightful, of a world marked by material misery, political corruption, racial prejudice, and passionate sensuality. It is a chaotic, static, indolent and precarious world that suddenly has to manage the arrival of many thousands of immigrants (Catalans, Spaniards, Jews, Italians...) from a Europe at war, and in which the three Catalan protagonists – Ramon, intellectual but worldly; Miquel, steadfast idealist; Lluís, conceited, boastful, soft – barely make a living doing jobs and little jobs, cohabiting with natives and other exiles, and thinking little or not at all about the past and all that they have left behind.Riera Llorca's literary operation, consisting in documenting from fiction – therefore, recreating not from literalness but from imagination – a concrete human experience in a specific historical period and territorial framework, still proves modern and lucid today. This is so because formally the novel has not become outdated and because the gallery of human types that parades through it is vivid and convincing, even in the cases of secondary and schematic characters.With a style that combines naturalist narration and reportage – vividness, drama, and symbolic power, but also detachment, clarity of style, and a desire for objectivity, as if everything were seen through the lens of a camera, although from time to time the narrator lets slip a judgmental adjective–, Tots tres surten per l’Ozama is a valuable work for literary, politico-historical, and human reasons. An important book.