It has been more than half a century since Colm Tóibín (Enniscorthy, 1955) read his first Henry James (New York, 1843 - London, 1916). "I had just turned 19, and I entered that very particular world with The Portrait of a Lady –he recalls now–. It was in the summer, and I discovered it for pleasure, without anyone recommending it or demanding it as a university course reading. It interested me so much that I went on to read the rest of his work over the following years, and then I reread it, and I ended up writing many articles about it. Since The Portrait of a Lady, I have never stopped keeping James in mind".

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.

He Colmo Tóibín who in 1975, having just turned 20, arrived in Barcelona "which was emerging from the calamities of dictatorship and repression" could not imagine that, half a century later, he would be such a popular author in Catalonia, that he would be received with all the honors by the mayor of the city, Jaume Collboni, and that he would become He is one of the writers chosen to represent the Catalan capital at this fall's Guadalajara Book Fair..