The teacher, who was a smoker, left the students in her 4th grade class alone for a moment because she had to go down to speak with the administration. On the table, she left a video camera, which she had used on the study trip they had returned from just a few hours earlier. Upon re-entering the classroom, she found the students recording each other, imitating the teachers. “They imitated me smoking with one hand in the back pocket of their pants.” There was one student who led all the mischief, an adorable leader who was liked wherever he went. Today, he is a recognized novelist and poet. It doesn't surprise her that he has reached where he has. We are talking about Carles Rabassa (Palma, 1977) with his former teacher, Bàrbara Terrassa.

The Mallorcan Carles Rebassa, winner of the Sant Jordi award for the novel Prometheus of a Thousand Ways, has criticized on social media the lack of institutional recognition after obtaining this award, one of the most prestigious in Catalan literature, convened annually by Òmnium Cultural, an entity dedicated to the defense of the Catalan language and culture.

Some remember him as the monitor who, during the 1996 colonies of the Association of Young Writers in Catalan Language (AJELC), held at Colonia de Sant Pere, ran down the hall shouting "I have the mission to save the Catalan language". Thirty years later, the Mallorcan Carles Rebassa (Palma, 1977) said more or less the same thing in a very different context. It was when he collected the Sant Jordi prize for the novel Prometheus of a Thousand Ways, which will go on sale on March 24th. "We must have legislation that makes Catalan essential for living in the Catalan Countries", he said.

Carles Rebassa, from Mallorca, used his acceptance speech for the Sant Jordi novel prize to focus on Palma, the city where his novel takes place. Prometheus in a thousand waysThe writer spoke with a tone of affection and concern about a city that, in his opinion, is undergoing a profound transformation. "It's a portrait of a city I love very much because it's my city," he said, but at the same time he sees it as "colonized, destroyed, devastated, and sunk."