Writers and Barcelona
Barcelona has been and keeps being a perfect scene for literary works, a source of inspiration for writers who were born here and a welcoming place for writers from around the world who have described it in their books.
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Rubén DARÍO
(Metagalpa, 1867 - León 1916)
Poet, journalist, and diplomat. Named "The Prince of Castillian Letters”, he is considered one of the pioneers of the Spanish-American literary movement known as modernism and follows the same ideology as Verlaine, “music above all else”. On 22 December 1898, he landed in Barcelona headed for Madrid, where he influenced young modernists such as Valle-Inclán, Juan Ramón Jiménez, and Jacinto Benavente, who formed part of the “Generation of ‘98”. In 1914 he settled in a house on Carrer Ticià, where everyone assumed he would stay indefinitely, but he had in fact come to work on Song of the Argentine and Other Poems.
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Carles DECORS
(Barcelona, 1954)
Degree in Economic and Business Sciences from the University of Barcelona, auditor, cultural manager, writer and photographer. In 1983 he won the Documenta Award for narrative with the novel FM: Fragmentació Modulada (1984). He is also the author of a book of short stories, El forat de l'agulla (1996) and the novels Al sud de Santa Isabel (1999), translated into Spanish with the title Al sur de Santa Isabel (2000), Aquell món idíl·lic (2007), El soroll del petit rèptil (2009), a work that received a grant from the Institution of Catalan Letters, in 2006, and El malson de Guinea (2018), a work with which completes the cycle on his novel vision of life in the Spanish colonies in the Gulf of Guinea and the tragic consequences of the decolonization process. The first version of Cicle d’acumulació, the book of poems with which he returns to the genre of poetry, was published in Valencia, in 1985, and was republished in 2021. In Autumn 2024, he publishes the book of stories La síndrome de la incertesa.
Bernat DESCLOT
(second half of the eighteenth century)
A chronicler, he is author of the book Chronicle of the Reign of King Pedro III of Aragon. Written around 1280, this chronicle by Bernat Desclot is focused on the reigns of James I and the Conqueror, and particularly on his son and successor, Peter the Great (1276-1285).
Jenn DÍAZ
(Barcelona, 1988)
Writer and press contributor. She is author of the books El duelo y la fiesta (2012), Mujer sin hijo (2013), Es un decir (2014), and Mare i Filla (2015). With her collection of books Vida Familiar, she won the Mercè Rodoreda award in 2016.
José DONOSO
(Santiago de Chile, 1925 – 1996)
Writer and journalist. Awarded National Prize in his country in 1990. He was childhood friends with Carlos Fuentes and published his first storybook Veraneo y otros cuentos in 1955. He was part of the so-called boom of Latin American literature, about which he wrote his account Historia personal del boom (1972). Harold Bloom considers him to be one of the key authors in the Western Canon of Literature. He lives exiled in Barcelona, the city where his work Tres novelitas burguesas (1973) is set.
Xènia DYAKONOVA
(Saint Petersburg, 1985)
Poet, translator, and literary critic, she graduated in Theory of Literature and Comparative Literature from the University of Barcelona, and since 2004 she has lectured in humanities and Russian language and literature at the Barcelona School of Writing at L’Ateneu. She translated Catalan work by authors such as Anton Txèkhov, Anna Politkóvskaia, Lev Tolstoi, Varlam Xalàmov and Aleksandr Kúixner and she is author of several poetry books.