Pollença City Council unanimously declares Xesca Ensenyat an Illustrious Daughter of the municipality

PalmIn an extraordinary plenary session, the Pollença City Council unanimously declared the writer Xesca Ensenyat (1952-2009) an Illustrious Daughter of the municipality. In March, a citizen initiative was registered with the City Council, which received nearly 100 signatures from the cultural, educational, and associative worlds of the municipality and Mallorca, requesting the City Council to declare the writer an Illustrious Daughter.

The promoters emphasized that of the twenty illustrious sons of the municipality of Pollença, only three were women, all of them nuns, two of them from the 14th and 16th centuries.

With this recognition, Ensenyat becomes the first illustrious daughter originally from Puerto de Pollença.

Narrative work and recognitions

Ensenyat cultivated a narrative oeuvre consisting of seven novels—two published posthumously—a literary memoir, and a collection of short stories. He also left behind several unpublished novels in which he magnificently portrays pre-tourist Pollença and Mallorca, especially the world of seafarers and fishermen, and its transformation with the arrival of the islanders. He also published a collection of poems, and some of his short stories were anthologized with leading figures from the literary generation of the 1970s, as is the case with the volumeSingle women(1995), where she shares the bill with writers of the stature of Carme Riera, Maria Mercè Marçal, Maria Barbal, Maria Antònia Oliver, etc.

Her work received several awards, including the City of Palma Novel Award in 1984 withVilla Coppola, the Ramon Muntaner Youth Literature Award in 1992 withWhen the squadron came, his best-known work, the 1975 Novel Ciudad de Manacor withThe Guipure Hideoutor the 1993 City of Mollerussa Short Novel Prize withToo much wine for one chalice. He even taught and became a finalist for the Josep Pla Prize, one of the most prestigious in the Catalan language, in 1986, with his unpublished novelPlexiglass.

Activism

The writer was a founding member and first president of the Pollensa branch of the Balearic Cultural Work in 1979, and was the driving force behind the publicationThe Rooster, one of the first of the wave of foreign press that emerged during the Transition. Later, he founded and directed The Spire, a monthly publication, started in 1987.