<![CDATA[Ara Balears in English - literature]]> 10 <![CDATA[Of this I also want to speak]]> I am glad that recent times have been benign, even happy with well-deserved awards such as the XXVI Jaume Fuster prize awarded by the Association of Writers in the Catalan Language, for Dolors Miquel, an essential author without whom the ends of the 20th century and the beginnings of the 21st century of Catalan literature cannot be understood, and now she proves it to us again with one of the most impressive books, without a doubt, that will be released this year: The sleeping breast,, at Edicions 62, with a beautiful cover by Miquel Barceló.In her more than remarkable career, Dolors Miquel has written mainly poetry, but she has also provided us with excellent examples of prose and theatre. Well, El pit adormit combines these and all textual possibilities and more: it has the breathtaking force of a colossal epic poem, it makes us advance through different plots and subplots like a great Catalan novel, it enjoys the resounding expression of a monologue that unfolds in furious bursts, it is read with the most electric eagerness of the best diaries, and whoever touches this does not touch a book – as Walt Whitman said, although Emily Dickinson could have said it without any problem – but touches a human being who has consecrated their life to Beauty in capital letters because Beauty has generated deep wounds and supreme passions in them, and for this reason they have no other motive than to create, to create with letters through an often ruthless power. I will continue pulling this thread of thought: there are books that are written, yes, but then there are others that impose themselves, that impose themselves on us, and I would dare to affirm that Dolors Miquel is one of those creators who finds herself imposed upon by the torrent that floods her, and in this case the tsunami has presented itself to her, at a decisive vital moment, in the form of memories, images, scenes, stories, little battles, suggestions, reflections, connections, and associations that end up taking the form of paragraphs in a resounding victory of the fragment, the note, the jotting, the flash, the sudden insight. The style may remind us of Lluís Maicas, but the style is pure Dolors Miquel in a reformulation we had never read from her before, and we already know that she has lived many lives and has been many Dolors Miquels and also Lola Miquel, but the Dolors Miquel of today has reached a peak, a milestone, a great book. The sleeping breast, by this new Dolors Miquel, is a striking vital testimony in a medical crisis that often leads to the abyss, a delicious album of snapshots that move us, an authentic philosophical treatise, a series of strong blows, an individual and collective memory of decisive changes in Catalan poetry, a masterpiece by a total writer in a state of grace

]]> <![CDATA[Risk passions]]> Underground is one of Jack Kerouac's most feverish and emotionally exposed works, a novel that turns the experience of love into a dizzying exploration of the limits of identity, desire, and self-destruction. Far from the itinerant, psychogeographic, and mythical dimension of On the Road, Kerouac here turns his gaze towards a more intimate and vulnerable universe, inspired by his complex relationship with Alene Lee, here transformed into the magnetic and unattainable figure of Mardou Fox, a stunning African American ten years his junior. The result is a text written with the intensity of an urgent confession, in which each sentence seems to chase the accelerated rhythm of thought and passion, and the emblematic author manages to capture the fragility of human bonds when they are caught between fascination, dependence, and the fear of loss.This dynamic narrative also highlights the fact that it describes the atmosphere of the more bohemian city of San Francisco in the early second half of the 20th century, when jazz was the soundtrack and symbol of a young generation that decided to live its own way, breaking conventions and rules. The beatnik revolt signified a brutal cultural insurrection, a radical refusal to accept the conformism, consumerism and spiritual impoverishment of post-war American society. Around figures like Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs, the typical ones, but also Diane di Prima, Anne Waldman, and Lenore Kandel, the beat generation claimed a life lived with intensity, open to experience, displacement, sexual freedom, mysticism, and the exploration of the limits of consciousness. More than a literary movement, it was an invitation to exist in other ways, a poetic rebellion against mechanization that anticipated many of the great cultural transformations of the sixties and seventies. In its pages beats the conviction that literature can once again be a vital adventure, a search for truth, and a form of resistance.The translation by Joan Antoni Cerrato for Edicions Documenta Balear deserves a standing ovation because it transfers to Catalan the syncopated breathing, improvisational energy, and torrential musicality of Kerouac's prose without losing its power or naturalness. Thanks to his good work, whoever wants to read this raw work will be able to access it fully to be amazed by its radical honesty and nihilism. The Subterraneans is not just a self-portrait of the writer or his generation, nor a snapshot with words of a specific environment; it is an immersion into the gears of astonishment, an urban odyssey that shakes with the intensity of an open wound and confirms Jack Kerouac as one of the most powerful prose writers in the history of literature.

]]> <![CDATA[I weave and the spider dances]]>

At all times it is relevant to read a praise of literature like the one Santiago Alba Rico makes in the pages of his latest book. He draws maps for us to travel to different “literary countries”, but he does not do so as a literary critic, but as a storyteller. It is the wonder of literature, books allow us to retell their stories again and again, sometimes faithfully, sometimes with betrayal. In fact, not ceasing to talk about books, including those written a long time ago, is what makes them continue to address us. Alba Rico puts six pairs of authors in dialogue, creating a kind of genealogy of his sensitivity as a reader. Kafka and Potter, Melville and Hergé, Dickens and Cervantes, Dostoevsky and Hašek, Shelley and McCullers, Austen and Proust. We have a book of books in our hands.

]]> <![CDATA[Rare earths]]> After eleven years of editorial silence – which in reality does not mean the poet has been quiet, as he himself makes clear in the magnificent prologue that serves as an introduction, since in reality all this time he has been brewing the event, waiting for the best moment and preparing for the explosion just like a good hunter – Emili Sánchez-Rubio publishes a new poetry book: Terres rares in the delightful collection La Fosca by Lleonard Muntaner, Editor. I want to say it right away: it is a colossal, visionary, prodigious work that confirms the author as one of the best of his generation. Therefore, we are faced with a return to the very top, an authentic renaissance, a resurgence that deserves all our attention and passion. Reading these pages illuminated by extreme wisdom, I have re-membered, returned things to the heart, according to the centennial Blai Bonet, how much the lyrical proposal of this prophet born in Ciutat de Mal in 1983 has always made me hallucinate, who has been a Necromancer and who now returns as an Alchemist or, even better, a Presocratic of the Future, an Oracular Scientist.Rare earths, as the title itself indicates, takes its name and atomic number from these elements that are very difficult to obtain and so poetic to, from their unfolding like a catalog of untamed matters in the style of Bartomeu Fiol, build the structure of the volume, which advances as we delve into the strange and precious fusion of entity and soul, of corpora and spirit. Recognizing chaos (in fact, the pages of this book are full of brutal oxymorons and paradoxes and contradictions) to unravel the cosmos, Emili Sánchez-Rubio shines in a verbal and philosophical way like Miquel Bauçà; as Andreu Vidal investigates the darkness to reach the conclusion that “in the Obscure, / all things are white”; he builds a foundational theory of Love following the example of the admired Robert Graves and secretes impossible images and real scenes, because in fact every poem is a legacy or a statement of incontinence, like the best disciple of the master and friend Emilio Arnao and achieves mystical genius that touches upon daily ardor and the epiphytic discovery of pure revelation: “The speed of light / is what it is / because it flees from Time.”Longer poems are combined with more synthetic poems in perfect balance, a brilliant cosmic balance that confirms the gifts of a brilliant and eloquent poet. The fascinating result, a pure fireball in the purest style of Bartomeu Rosselló-Pòrcel of our era, is an admirable cosmogonic theory that returns poetry to its place as an exceptional vehicle of visionary knowledge and seals it through a messianic expression. ‘Terres rares’, by Emili Sánchez-Rubio, is, and I say this without doubts or regrets, a sublime book in every sense.

]]> <![CDATA[Ricard Ruiz Garzón wins the Guillem Cifre de Colonya prize]]>

The Barcelona writer Ricard Ruiz Garzón has been proclaimed winner of the XLV Guillem Cifre de Colonya Children's and Youth Narrative Award 2026 for the work Trenta pares vaig tenir (i encara me'n queden dos), a novel aimed at readers between 8 and 14 years old that combines humor, fantasy, and reflection on the family.

]]> <![CDATA[Automatic literature]]> Following a recent case of plagiarism of an article in the Catalan sphere, which the forger attributed to a mishap caused by AI, and a rather important Anglo-Saxon literary prize, which an author allegedly won also using AI, there has been renewed discussion in the world of literary creativity about what we will do from now on with texts that wish to circulate in the world, the authorship of which may be questioned by virtue of their possible algorithmic origin. For someone to use AI to write a literary piece can only be due to reasons related to their shortcomings as an intellectual or as a writer. For a true author, using AI to write would be like using skates to play football, when precisely the grace of the game is running. For me, having the machine write for me is equivalent to having a machine make love for me, or sending a robot to bed with the lover, simply because I'm lazy or I fear that this way I will look better in front of my beloved. It makes no sense to entrust a machine to do what gives us pleasure and lucidity, what makes us feel alive and intelligent. Furthermore, I doubt that any machine can currently write with the accuracy that good writers continue to have, but even if that point were reached in the near future, what the bot might tell us would also be of no interest, since it is literally no one and what ends up being interesting about literature and journalism is what a flesh-and-blood person thinks—or feels or sees—about it. A machine cannot tell me what I think about things, because it does not know. Thanks to AI, we might end up simulating an erudition that we do not have, or pretending to have read books we have not actually read, but that would not be a new imposture either. Cheaters are older than the printing press in this trade, and it was precisely the printing press that democratized writing and knowledge. AI is nothing more than a kind of automatic printing press, which produces text at the consumer's whim, which is not what writers end up doing; the role of intellectuals is precisely to remind us of what we do not want to remember, or to make us think about things that can give us a headache. When I see an AI questioning the fundamental ideas of the tribe, I will begin to get scared, but for the moment it is only the voice of the master, because we should not forget that all AI is nothing more than a form of business for those who give it a push. “We were clever enough to invent AI, and foolish enough to need it, and stupid enough that we can't figure out if we did the right thing…”; this was said by none other than the comedian Jerry Seinfeld in a recent interview. And we can think about whether he's right or not without AI. I, for one, still prefer to keep reading people who make mistakes, who doubt, who obsess, and even who self-destruct while writing, rather than a machine that simply calculates which sentence fits best with the preceding ones. Literature is not just text production: it is vanity, it is contradiction, it is a human consciousness trying to understand itself. And this, for better or for worse, cannot yet be automated. 

]]> <![CDATA["On a stage, it is impossible to die better than Isolde"]]>

This Wednesday, June 3, and as part of the Palma Book Fair, in Plaça d’Espanya, Pere Estelrich i Massutí will present his collection of articles with a common denominator and a sufficiently eloquent title: Wagnerian Chronicles, published by Edicions Documenta Balear within the Menjavents collection. Estelrich needs no introduction. He is known on his own merits. A mathematician, he writes, disseminates and spreads wisdom everywhere: in newspapers, on the radio, wherever his knowledge is required. He writes as he speaks, clearly and entertainingly, as only someone who carries a wealth of many years and no little work, done with passion, which his words undoubtedly convey, can do.

]]> <![CDATA[Protest speech of Fades at the Palma Book Fair: "Culture is not protected as a right"]]>

The Mallorcan urban music group Fades inaugurated this Friday the 44th edition of the Palma Book Fair with a markedly vindictive opening speech in defense of the Catalan language, local culture, and the role of young creators. The trio, formed by Àngel Exojo, Ferran Pi, and Vicenç Calafell, took advantage of the inaugural event to demand more institutional support for culture made in Catalan and to denounce policies that, in their opinion, contribute to weakening its public presence.

]]> <![CDATA[The gifted intelligence of flowers]]> “Humanity, almost all of it, has lost its natural value” is one of the many and valuable sentences that conceptually flood, and with all the reason and urgency in the world, Laia Malo’s newly released and exceptional poetry collection: Rum-rum in the prestigious Jardins de Samarcanda collection of the Cafè Central label. I say it is exceptional because it truly is: the author takes a brutal leap forward in her career and gives us her best book, a volume sedimented and nourished by each and every one of the poet's multiple tasks, since in addition to being a translator from English and Russian, Malo also translates other languages of the globe, especially those of the fascinating universes of insects, so that we may understand and grasp other realities beyond the surfaces of things. Alongside necessary denunciations like those already mentioned, there is, at the same time and at every happy moment, a firm sentiment of hope: the unrenounceable illusion that a change is still possible that leads to a new global consciousness of an essential return to the natural environment. In fact, the poet, more ambitious than ever, invites a re-foundation of all Culture in the face of Nature: “In the beginning was the Green.” And no, it is not just a dazzling verbal finding, it is the renewing spirit of a magnificent book built from prodigious political biopoems, not the first in Catalan literature but undoubtedly the best so far.We had already been able to hear and read just complaints like these thanks to the expanded work of Laia Malo with her expanded writings: as a member of the increasingly recognized electroverse duo Jansky and as the person responsible for very well-crafted periodic articles in ARA Balears. But it is true that it is the first time that these other literary formats nourish her verses and her poems. The result is a book of colossal dynamism, both structural and mental. With Rum-rum we witness a transformation as huge as the one that Blai Bonet brought about when he left behind the models of the Escola Mallorquina, and it is that Laia Malo takes a leap and surpasses the current paradigms of representing in words the biological environments that surround us, since they are not scenarios, they are not wild spaces that escape our absurd civilizing desire, they are complete macrocosms that we do not take into account enough, and this is our tragedy, our uprooting. Rum-rum is a novel, wildly vital song, a new gospel that sings of the gifted intelligence of flowers and blossoms with tongues of exuberant, super-fertile libido.Rum-rum, by Laia Malo, does not reproduce the music of the spheres, it captures the rhythms and melodies of the planet and posits itself as a proof of faith that drives us to believe that people still have time to become human beings again.

]]> <![CDATA[New scholarship for writers: 500 euros, 10 days in a hotel in Magaluf and literary residency]]>

The Magaluf Expanded Literature Festival (FLEM) has announced the first literary residency in the town, a program offering two ten-day creation grants for writers working in Catalan and English. The residences will take place at the Innside Calvià Beach hotel and include accommodation, travel, an economic endowment of 500 euros, and participation in the next edition of the festival. The deadline for submitting applications will be open until June 15, and applications must be sent through the form available on the event's website.the event's website.

]]> <![CDATA[The Jaume Santandreu Foundation is born, which will have its headquarters in the Barracar neighborhood of Manacor]]>

The social and literary legacy of Jaume Santandreu i Sureda takes shape with the creation of the Foundation that bears his name. An entity that will be based in Manacor, in the Barracar neighborhood, and that is conceived and committed to preserving and disseminating both Santandreu's work in the field of social exclusion in Mallorca (with the aim of continuing the legacy started at Can Gazà) and his literary legacy.

]]> <![CDATA["Poetry is the opportunity to use words in another way"]]>

Born in Sant Joan in 1998, Júlia Febrer Bausà is part of this new generation of voices that approach poetry with their own perspective, made of word, image, and matter. Her name has begun to resonate strongly within the literary landscape after winning the Ciutat de Manacor de Poesia Miquel Àngel Riera 2025 prize with Arrel inoïda, a work that confirms the solidity of an author still young, but with an already well-defined poetic universe. This recognition has been joined this year by the Martí Dot de Poesia prize, organized by the Sant Feliu de Llobregat City Council, for the poetry collection Llum de cendra, which will be published in the autumn.

]]> <![CDATA[Difficult it is]]> It has been a long time since Edicions Poncianes published anything new, which is why it has been a joy that this very special label has brought to light a most interesting volume: Difàcil, the new title by Manel Ollé, a professor of Chinese History and Culture at Pompeu Fabra University, translator, critic, and, above all, a poet of outstanding career who has deserved prestigious awards such as the Ciutat de Palma Joan Alcover de Poesia prize with Mirall negre, the Sant Cugat Poetry prize in memory of Gabriel Ferrater with Bratislava o Bucarest and the Jocs Florals de Barcelona prize with Un grapat de pedres d’aigua, among others.Difàcil continues the integrative line of different textualities within the framework of the page, that is, it is certainly a book of poems, but these are presented through different modalities. On the one hand, prose poems that combine with verses that are either free or presented with various metric resources: haikus, haibuns, decasyllables… Each proposal has, of course, a different breath, a detail that contributes to the richness of resources. Furthermore, there are different themes and registers: pages that delve into "the palace of memory" (with a multitude of trips around the globe, even excursions to curious corners like those in the film Léolo, by Jean-Claude Lanzon), streams that seem like dreams or surreal scenes (which function as independent stories that could have been included without any hesitation in Combats singulars. Antologia del conte català contemporani edited by Ollé himself), texts that delve into the impossibility of faithful representation through the insistence of the letter… Regarding this field, in his film La Chinoise, Jean-Luc Godard has the politicized characters say that "art is not a reflection of reality, but the reality of the reflection," and some fragments of Difàcil seem to arrive at this same conclusion, especially those that reflect on the natural idiosyncrasy of any copy (one of the themes that Manel Ollé dealt with in the book Plagia millor!) or rewriting, and here the author establishes fruitful dialogues with illustrious rewriters such as Josep Carner, Miquel Bauçà and Josep Palàcios. Two more arts can be linked to Difàcil: architecture and music. Regarding the former, Manel Woodcutter Song's illustrations seem like psychogeographic maps that trace the increasingly complex and labyrinthine journey of the pages as they progress. Regarding the latter, various artists like John Cage are mentioned not in vain: let's recall what Cage said about silence being impossible, there is always the background hum of our body, an idea that hovers over the spirit of a book born from a telephone spark and a creative flare that grows and expands from rereads and rewrites.

]]> <![CDATA["The person who commits suicide does not want to die, they want to stop suffering"]]>

Joan Carles March Cerdà (1960) is a Doctor of Medicine and currently a professor at the Andalusian School of Public Health, of which he was director. He is one of the most media-friendly island doctors. This resident of Pollença, based in Granada, has just published Más de 11 vidas, a collection of testimonies from people with suicide attempts, their families and survivors, as well as experts in the field.

]]> <![CDATA[What are the authors from the Islands writing now?]]>

Of the vast majority of writers, only the published works are known. This means not only those that found a publishing house to launch them onto the market, but, above all, those that the authors themselves considered finished, as good. But in most careers, many are left by the wayside for very diverse reasons: authors who lose interest in the topic they are working on, the emergence of new projects that turn out to be more seductive, urgent, or timely, and the daily complications that surround the writing process, which can have as much to do with inspiration as with the conditions of the jobs with which the writing profession is normally combined. Eight island authors share with ARA Balears the texts they are currently working on, when many of them do not even have a publication date secured. These are the books we may not know if we will read, but that they are all writing now.

]]> <![CDATA[Island writers also join the non-fiction 'boom']]>

Among the thousands of new releases that will arrive in bookstores in the coming months – more than 85,000 books are published each year in Spain, the vast majority in print, according to data from the Federation of Publishers' Guilds – there are numerous by Balearic authors. And a very important part of those that will be published before the end of the year will be found in the non-fiction section. This is the case of the new book by writer Lucia Pietrelli, with the provisional title Vestiges. Labyrinth with a father with flames. It will be after the summer that Adia Edicions will publish this literary essay where, from the personal experience of her father's death, Pietrelli explores, investigates, and fabricates on the theme of death through mythology.

]]> <![CDATA[Ready for a grand journey?]]> Who dares to claim that Catalan literature is in decline? I can only see an increasingly ambitious, increasingly powerful creativity. In recent years, more voices, more styles, more generations have coexisted than ever before, as well as more proposals than in our entire history. Given this, I declare that it is evident that we do have State structures: publishing in Catalan, translation into Catalan, and literature in Catalan are undoubtedly so. Because there are books that contain, within themselves, countries and utopias. This is the sensation I have had reading recent epic epics that capture the essence of our chaotic and exciting world such as Cor pirinenc, by Lluís Calvo (Lleonard Muntaner, Editor, Jacint Verdaguer Prize); Arnau, by Adrià Targa (Editorial Proa, Critics' Prize), and El Periple, by Damià Rotger Miró (Galés Edicions, Mallorca Poetry Prize 2025).

]]> <![CDATA["Doing homework with candles is still part of many people's lives"]]>

Yúnez Chaib, a comedian born in Melilla and raised in Mallorca, has developed her career through wit, sensitivity, and social criticism. We talk about her beginnings at Trampa Teatre in Palma to her rise to popularity on shows like La Resistencia, channels like Comedy Central, and the book she has just published, Corderito (Aguilar, 2026), which she will present on May 16 in Manacor –12 p.m. at Món de Llibres– and on June 5 in Palma.

]]> <![CDATA[The sirens]]> Perhaps the best metaphor to understand what is happening to us has been put into writing by Chris Hayes, the American journalist, whose essay, The Song of the Sirens, has just been translated into Spanish. It is a serious, informative, and at the same time very critical work of the current attention capitalism society, when we live immersed in a sea of continuous noise and have learned to pay attention only to what makes the most noise —what stands out amidst the continuous bustle—, or to the song of the sirens. But Ulysses chained himself to the ship's mast to avoid succumbing, he imposed limits on himself to avoid falling into what could distract him from the life he wanted to lead, something we find ourselves unable to do, always looking at screens. Although in principle it is not 'the screens' that are the problem, but rather the applications designed to capture and hold our attention in a enslaved manner and then make a profit from 'our eyes', reselling our attention to advertisers who insert advertising in the midst of the content that the algorithm has discovered fascinates us. This is how we spend our hours, attention time that we could dedicate to matters that are truly useful, or that give us some measure of happiness. If the average in Spain is three and a half hours per person per day of mobile phone use, how many things could we do to recover this time in our lives? How many languages could we learn? How many instruments could we master? How much love could we give to others instead of watching strange videos or participating in useless controversies? And how could everyone's culture improve if, instead of looking at a screen, books were read; therefore, people consumed more literature, which would also benefit the publishing market? The progress of humanity was based on the idea that a day would come when, beyond work time and night rest, we would have time to dedicate ourselves to our true interests, to our inner freedom. But now that we could finally have some leisure hours: why have we uselessly given them away? Let's focus on this: the ‘masters’ of this lost time are the richest men in the world, the owners of X, Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, etc. Networked capitalism has been built on the time we were supposed to emancipate ourselves from, just as industrial capitalism did on the time we were supposed to go to factories and mass production centers. Now we find ourselves even incapable of reading a short text, like this article, and let alone a whole novel, much less if it is long and perhaps a bit demanding. The only way, now, to read certain things is to ‘tie yourself’ to the mast of the ship, that is, disconnect the phone, even turn off the modem to avoid temptations to connect and check the screen every fifteen minutes. The fact that we are in this state, so interfered with, should worry us, because this is, literally, the alienation that Marxism intended to denounce. Your life is no longer yours if even the time of your freedom is blocked.       

]]> <![CDATA[Suck my autonomy]]> In the interviews that Mahmud Darwish gives in the beautiful volume La Palestina com a metàfora (Lleonard Muntaner, Editor), the Palestinian poet delves into crucial themes, such as the idea of permanent exile and the breakdown of History due to the fragility of the links of transmission –an idea that Lluís Calvo analyzes in the magnificent essay Els llegats (Arcàdia) – and also into the fact that the body has become the last bulwark, the last refuge, the definitive weapon with which to continue the fight in these times of chaos. I would dare to say that this is one of the keys to understanding the proliferation and exaltation of corporeal poetics and morbid poetry, essential trends in 21st-century Catalan poetry in a movement of forces that markedly opposes a recalcitrant neo-formalism that returns to meter and rhyme as foundations for verse writing. I thought of all this while reading, and enjoying, El cant de les cigales, the newest and most brutal title by the Llucmajor poet Cecília Navarro, a work more than worthy of the 43rd Manuel Rodríguez Martínez Ciutat d’Alcoi Poetry Prize.

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