Coia Valls (Reus 1960) is an actress, teacher, speech therapist, and writer. In 2010 she won the Néstor Luján prize for historical novels with her first novel, The Jade Princess. She now publishes her tenth, Gaudí's Dream (Rosa dels Vents).

She studied at the Sant Josep school in Reus. “It was a convent school, and my mother started taking me before I was old enough, at two years old, because she had to work and look after my younger sister”. She was a very quiet child. “While my sister would climb everywhere, I was like an artichoke. I would listen, look, play with a toy and could spend hours like that”.

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The writer Najat El Hachmi (Beni Sidel, 1979) responds gracefully to the proposal of this interview: "You invite me to weddings." The winner of, among others, the Ramon Llull, City of Barcelona, ​​and Christmas prizes, who has just published a new edition of The Body Hunter (Ediciones 62, 2026), not only relates to the world through the embellishing filter of literature: it also does so through taste.

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Family is the most important thing we have. Especially our immediate family, the people you live with and are closest to. The unconditional support. Wife, parents, siblings... grandparents.

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Carme Riera (Palma de Mallorca, 1948) is a writer and professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). Winner of the National Narrative Prize, the Josep Pla Prize, the Crexells Prize, and the Lletra d'Or Prize, among others, she publishes Thank you, a literary memoir of fifty years of writing.

She spent her early childhood in a large house in the center of Palma. "It was very damp. I remember the tiles covered in water, the bed soaked as if you'd stepped into the sea. On the other hand, it had a garden that I loved because you could run around and feel a bit free." The house had three floors. "Each of us had a floor: my parents lived on the ground floor, my grandmother and aunt lived on the first floor, and upstairs, on the third floor, lived my grandfather." My grandfather was quite a character: "He was very funny, he had a gym, a library, he rode his bicycle from 7 in the morning until 2, he swam in the sea whether it was summer or winter, he was quite eccentric."

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Marina believes that you can't love one child more than another, but that you relate to them in very different ways, because they are different people. She also believes that a mother can't save her children; that she must observe them and accompany them if they ask, without judging them. She's also convinced that, for her children, she would be capable of anything: killing, stealing, prostituting herself, and dying. She's a woman who, like me, when she became a mother, let her beast out; her mammalian nature flowed more than her human nature. She let herself be guided by what she felt she had to do rather than by how she should do it or what she was told to do.

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After twenty-five years working as a publicist, Gloria de Castro (Caldes de Montbui, 1974) moved from Madrid to Llubí (Mallorca), where she dedicates herself, in turn, to writing, her family and to Brut, a restaurant founded by her partner, chef Eduardo Martínez. De Castro, who won the Llibreter award in 2022 for The moment before impact, published his second novel in June, The solemn temples (Periscope, 2025).

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Xuan Bello, a great writer in the Asturian language, a great writer of our time in any language, has died at the age of sixty. He died, as they say, unexpectedly, and that is consistent with him, because he never wrote, thought, or said anything predictable. This is evident in his books, in which surprise, the unexpected, lurked, as in Borges's maxim: "I have said dazzlement where others say custom." However, he was not seeking gratuitous dazzlement, an easy coup de grâce: the dazzlement in Xuan Bello's pages responded to the wonder of the very fact of living. A tragic wonder, the painful marvel of living. The glare, at the head of the street, to put it like another great poet, Jordi Sarsanedas.

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Your last book, Down here, in which you talk about the Ruta del Bakalao, takes place on the Mediterranean coast, but the wine element never appears. Why do you think it doesn't fit in with that setting?

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My son's vision of Barcelona is much more radical than mine. The city no longer appeals to him, and he doesn't feel as connected to it. When we go downtown, he experiences it as too touristy. The overcrowding stresses him out, and having to constantly be on the lookout for crime repels him. In fact, he would prefer to live outside the city, in a more relaxed environment.

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Gerard Guix (Vic, 1975) is a writer and playwright. He won the 2022 Joaquim Ruyra Prize with the youth novel A lighthouse at the end of the world. Now he has published the second part, Beyond the end of the world.

He lived in Tona until the fifth year of primary school and in the sixth year they moved to Vic. "I went to the Sagrado Corazón. I was a good student, a good boy. When I was older, in high school, not so much, because I got bored." He did vocational training at the Vic Institute. "Electricity and electronics, because my parents said I was going to study something until I could go to Barcelona to do image and sound, which was what I wanted." And after school? "In Tona I played football, but I didn't like it at all. In Vic, IT, with those giant computers... But I don't remember many extracurricular activities."

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