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Mercè Rodoreda i Gurgui (Barcelona, 1908- Girona, 1983) - Catalan novelist, born in Barcelona.
She is considered by many to be the most important Catalan novelist of the postwar period. Her novel La plaça del diamant (1962) is the most acclaimed Catalan novel of all time and has been translated into 20 languages.
She began her career by writing short stories for magazines, as an escape from an unhappy marriage. She then wrote psychological novels, including Aloma which won the Crexells Prize.
At the start of the Spanish Civil War, she worked for the Catalan Generalitat's Propaganda Department.
She was exiled in France and later Switzerland, where in 1958 she broke her silence with Twenty-Two short stories, which earned her the Víctor Català Prize. With Camelia Street (El Carrer de les Camèlies) (1966) she won several prizes. In the 1970s, she returned to Romanyà de la Selva in Catalonia and finished the novel Mirall trencat (Broken Mirror) in 1974.
Amongst other works came Viatges i flors (Travels and flowers) and Quanta, quanta guerra (How much War) in 1980, which was also the year in which she won the Premi d'Honor de les Lletres Catalanes.
In 1998 a prize was instituted in her name: the Mercè Rodoreda prize for short stories and narratives.
She was member and Member of Honour of the Association of Writers in Catalan (Associació d'Escriptors en Llengua Catalana).
Some of her most important works include:
- Aloma (1938)
- Vint-i-dos contes (1958)
- La plaça del diamant (1962)
- El carrer de les camèlies (1966)
- Jardí vora el mar (1967)
- Mirall Trencat (1974)
- Semblava de seda i altres contes (1978)
- Quanta, quanta guerra... (1980)
- La mort i la primavera (1986)
External Links
See [1] (http://www.escriptors.com/autors/rodoredam/)ca:Mercè Rodoreda i Gurgui