Mercè Rodoreda

Mercè Rodoreda (Barcelona, 1908 – Girona, 1983) was a novelist who wrote in Catalan and is regarded as the most influential Catalan-language writer of her era. Her work has been translated into dozens of languages, and her novel La plaça del diamant is the most popular Catalan novel to date, a book that gave her an international readership far beyond Catalonia.

She grew up in a house with a garden in the San Gervasio district of Barcelona, in a family that loved literature and theatre. Her maternal grandfather, Pere Gurguí, a devoted admirer of the poet Jacint Verdaguer, passed on a strong Catalan identity and a love of the language and of flowers, themes that run through her fiction. Her formal schooling was brief, and by the age of five she had already performed on stage. After her grandfather died, an uncle moved into the family home and imposed a strict, conventional order. In 1928 she married him, fourteen years her senior; because of their family relationship, they needed a papal dispensation.

Marriage left her restless, and she began writing as a way to gain some independence. In 1931 she took lessons from the pedagogue and linguist Delfín Dalmau, who encouraged her to publish. Her first novel, Sóc una dona honrada?, appeared in 1932 and went largely unnoticed. She contributed to newspapers, wrote children's stories, and in 1936 published Crim, a book she later disowned as the work of an inexperienced writer.

When the Spanish Civil War began, she worked as a Catalan-language proofreader for the Generalitat's propaganda office. Aloma, published in 1938, was the first book she accepted as her own and later rewrote. Though she had never taken part in politics, she went into exile in France in 1939, partly on her mother's advice, leaving her son in her mother's care in the belief that the separation would be short. The exile lasted for decades, and it was during these years that she wrote much of her mature work.

Her reputation rests above all on La plaça del diamant (1962), a novel about a woman's life in Barcelona that reached a wide audience. Her prose, attentive to everyday detail and to memory, places her among the major names of Catalan fiction. After her death, a further talent came to light: painting, which she had set aside in favour of writing.