Mercè Rodoreda

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Mercè Rodoreda

Mercè Rodoreda i Gurgui (Barcelona, 1908 – Girona, 1983) was a Catalan novelist.

She is considered by many to be the most important Catalan novelist of the postwar period. Her novel La plaça del diamant (The Time of the Doves) (1962) has become the most acclaimed Catalan novel of all time and since the year it was published for the first time, it has been translated into over 20 languages. It's also considered by many to be best novel dealing with the Spanish Civil War.

[edit] Biography

She began her career by writing 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 wasn't 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 Catalan Generalitat's Public Affairs Department.

She was exiled in France and later Switzerland, where in 1958 she broke her silence with the publication of her book Twenty-Two short stories, which earned her the Víctor Català Prize. With Camelia Street (El Carrer de les Camèlies) (1966) she won several prizes. In the 1970s, she returned to Romanyà de la Selva in Catalonia and finished the novel Mirall trencat (Broken Mirror) in 1974.

Amongst other works came Viatges i flors (Travels and flowers) and Quanta, quanta guerra (How much War) 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 Association of Writers in Catalan Language (Associació d'Escriptors en Llengua Catalana).