Mesquidian Letters Honorary Award

"Will I be able to say your name, disheveled boy, now that you have been awarded the Catalan Letters of Honor prize?"

The text you're reading right now isn't an article. It's a love letter written to a notepad that could also be a "silver notebook," "almost a dialogue," a precarious but utterly sincere "onboard scribble," or the writings of a teenager spied on with malicious intent by his mother. And I say it's a text, and not an article, because it's not always necessary to name and categorize things. Sometimes it's worthwhile (or joyful, as he says) to let them rest in the slant, in the space of freedom that can be a "I've written this" or a more neutral and open "if you want, you can do that other thing."

I would like to write about the poetic magma that is Biel Mesquida's writing. I would like, with this text that already seems too brief, to create a hyperlink to all the titles of his complete works, in the Mesquidian word written and sung and spoken and declaimed and balladed and called forth and shared in theaters, in cafes, in schools, in academies, and at dinner tables in every country. Because Biel Mesquida is so Mallorcan that he was born in Castellón de la Plana, and he is so Catalan that he doesn't renounce any of the words that language gives us to make our own and to invent: it is the "trembling brain" and the "drift" and the "composition" that throb in the heart of his writing. I would like to list the cloisters, the swimming pools, the alcoves, the cars crashed on the most tragic curves of the Serra de Tramuntana. I would like to try on every naked skin and every dress, to put names like Llorença, Mariana, Aralia, Dáior, Enona, Amador in my mouth.

I'd also like to softly sing about the awakening of having read Biel Mesquida for the first time, and more specifically The beautiful country where men desire men (1974) and The salt teenager (1975), when I was beginning to imagine what kind of writer I might become. I would like to copy them three hundred times and photocopy them another three hundred, to scatter them around the world like a slogan that doesn't want to sell any merchandise, phrases like "the beautiful hole of my anus" or "JOAN AND TONI LOVE EACH OTHER VERY MUCH." I would like to reread his Incarnations (2022), which rise from the page because they are living matter, and the exquisiteness of Llefre de ti (2012), and his poetry in the form of poems, published in recent years in Carpe momentum (2021) and now in Junk (2026).

Writers are, first and foremost, readers. And I don't know if I could imagine myself without the constellation of authors who have come before me and who are still here, whom I've read like friendly lights. Biel Mesquida shines like a galaxy among them, and I like to think that now the whole country will be exposed to that burst of light and creativity. It's very much like true freedom, like the light of experiencing pleasure, like the light of things that must be said and felt because that's how justice is done, and beauty is created, and light is created that gives light. Many happy returns, Biel Mesquida!