Four books to know Concha Alós, much more than the ex of Baltasar Porcel

PalmaConcha Alós is the only person who has won the Planeta prize twice and, even so, both her figure and her works are still awaiting justice. Although the first time, with Los enanos (1962), the award was contested because Plaza & Janés claimed the rights—Alós had submitted the manuscript to the publisher and they initially rejected it for having overly socialist ideas—, two years later she won it officially with Las hogueras (1964).

Unlike her contemporaries –Carmen Martín Gaite or Camilo José Cela–, her work was on the verge of ending up in oblivion and she herself, buried in a common grave in Barcelona, after living in Palma and being born in Valencia. As happens with female figures, her career has been linked to her personal life, as the ex-partner of Baltasar Porcel, and disparaged for being a feminist.

Although Alós only published in Spanish, her biographer, Amparo Ayora, asserts that she used Catalan in her day-to-day life. “She considered that she did not have enough training to write in Catalan, but she did translations from one language to the other,” she points out. Likewise, when she worked as a teacher in the 50s in Can Picafort and Santa Maria “she had to teach the classes in Catalan, in a mixture of dialects, because the poor children did not understand any Spanish at all”. Ayora's research will be published this autumn in book format with the title Las ciudades de Concha Alós, with the Valencian publishing house Vincle.

'The Dwarfs' (1962)Compared to La colmena, by Camilo José Cela, and intended to be titled Las ratas, it is the first novel with which Alós won the Planeta. In this story, the writer creates a social portrait of Francoism through the descriptions of the characters who frequented the Pensión Eloísa, where she stayed upon arriving in Barcelona.

'The Bonfires' (1964)It was the novel with which she officially won the Planeta prize. Set in Son Bauló, it features characters that invite one to see the story as an autobiographical portrait: an intellectual husband who does not satisfy his wife and a protagonist obsessed with fashion magazines who wants to escape her marriage.

'The Red Horse' (1966)Together with La madama (1969), this novel belongs to the cycle of books she published about the Civil War. It portrays her childhood and adolescence in Castelló, and she becomes one of the first authors to write about the conflict, based on a universal story: that of the refugees forced to leave only with their memories.

'King of Cats. Anthropophagous Narratives' (1972)It marks a stage of new narrative techniques, which also includesOs habla Electra (1975) and Argeo ha muerto, supongo (1982). It is a collection of short stories that represented an aesthetic breakthrough for her and where she opens up to the world of fantasy. The psychoanalytic burden that begins to be part of her work is reflected in this book, with an almost psychedelic prose.