Mercè Rodoreda


Mercè Rodoreda i Gurguí was a Catalan novelist.
She has been called the most important Catalan novelist of the postwar period. Her novel La plaça del diamant has become the most popular Catalan novel to date and has been translated into over 30 languages. Some critics consider it to be one of the best novels published in Spain after the Spanish Civil War.

Biography

She was born at 340 carrer de Balmes, Barcelona, in 1908. Her parents were Andreu Rodoreda, from Terrassa and Montserrat Gurguí, from Maresme. Her parents' financial problems prompted her to leave school at age nine. In 1928, just 20 years old, she married her uncle Joan Gurguí, 14 years her senior, and in 1929 she had her only child, Jordi. She began her writing career with short stories in magazines, as an escape from her unhappy marriage. She then wrote psychological novels, including Aloma which won the Crexells Prize, but even with the success this novel enjoyed, Rodoreda decided to remake and republish it some years later since she was not fully satisfied with this period of her life and her works at that time.
At the start of the Spanish Civil War, she worked for the Generalitat de Catalunya, the autonomous Government of Catalonia.
She was exiled in France and later Switzerland, where in 1957 she broke her silence with the publication of her book Twenty-Two short stories, which earned her the Víctor Català Prize. With Camelia Street she won several prizes. In the 1970s, she returned to Romanyà de la Selva in Catalonia and finished the novel Mirall trencat in 1974.
Amongst other works came Viatges i flors and Quanta, quanta guerra in 1980, which was also the year in which she won the Premi d'Honor de les Lletres Catalanes. During the last period of her lifetime, her works developed from her usual psychologic style to become more akin to symbolism in its more cryptic form.
In 1998 a literature prize was instituted in her name: the Mercè Rodoreda prize for short stories and narratives.
She was made a Member of Honour of the Associació d'Escriptors en Llengua Catalana, the Association of Writers in Catalan Language. The library in Platja d'Aro is named in her honor.
She died in Girona of liver cancer, and was interred in the cemetery of Romanyà.

Most important works

Original editions

Novels

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