An August 11th many years ago is the protagonist of the song of the same name by Els Nens Eutròfics, the music group that Josep Pedrals had. The song, which intentionally begins with a beat of 11/8, tells of a holiday in Montserrat. And it is that the poet and rapper is very clear that Montserrat is his favorite place in Catalonia: "I hold it dear because as a child I walked the entire mountain." That is where he spent all his summers until his early twenties, and as he got older it has been a place to take refuge and go to write: "When we were younger we stayed there for two months and in August we met up with the group of friends, which was changing, those from the first and second fortnight. Even now, every June we meet with the group." When Josep was seven or eight years old, his father, who was already retired, was the one who took care of him and his sister, and his mother would come up on weekends until she settled in for the holidays. Pedrals liked these holidays of staying in one place, living there and feeling like you belonged there.It explains that over the years Montserrat has been changing and expelling people, only one and a half buildings of cells remain, and there used to be three. The type of public is also different: “Now there are tourists, foreigners, who are passers-by, nothing to do with the people who used to come up with their lunch boxes and eat on the way to Sant Miquel”. He recalls that there was a lot of life, it was a kind of mini-village of summer residents where many things happened: they organized hot chocolate gatherings, rum punch, bicycle races, a scary route along the path of the drips… “It was fantastic”, he assures.

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.

More than sixty Catalan authors They have traveled to Mexico to represent Barcelona at the 39th International Book Fair (FIL) From Guadalajara, where the city is the guest of honor. Ten of the participants summarize their journey across the Atlantic in their own words.