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| Mercè Rodoreda i Gurguí |
She is considered by many to be the most important novelist of the postwar period. Her novel La plaça del diamant translated as 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 30 languages.
She was born at 340 carrer de Balmes, Barcelona, in 1908. 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, 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.
More information: Any Rodoreda (1908-2008) & Virtual Exhibition
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| Rodoreda in La Plaça del Diamant |
In the 1970s, she returned to Romanyà de la Selva in Girona 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.
She died in Girona and was buried in the cemetery of Romanyà.
The time that rolls on and on in people's hearts and makes them roll along with it and gradually changes us inside and out and makes us what we'll be on our dying day.
Mercè Rodoreda
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