At the beginning of the 1970s, it was not uncommon to find a future Nobel Prize winner on Paseo de Gràcia, at the La Balsa restaurant, at the Tusset Drugstore or having a drink at Bocaccio.
Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa led the Barcelona literary boom and attracted other great Latino writers to the Catalan capital such as Alfredo Bryce Echenique, José Donoso, Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar, Jorge Edwards... whose talent flourished in Barcelona in the heat of the literary agent Carmen Balcells.
Fifty years later, history repeats itself. Writers from Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Peru, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador and Chile have settled in Barcelona to display their full literary potential. The city lives the years of the new boom. The power of its publishing industry continues to be the main pole of attraction, although there are others such as the academic offer, for example the master's degree in Literary Creation at IDEC-UPF, directed by Jorge Carrión and José María Micó, which they have already completed the Argentines Samanta Schweblin –who lives in Berlin, although she will move to Barcelona in January–, Martín Caparrós or Belén López Peiró.
Even so, the echoes of Balcells still resonate in the memory of many of these literary promises, such as that of López Peiró, who is a client of his agency, and who stood out with his first novel Why did you return every summer (The outskirts), a Crude account of the abuse he suffered from a family member. Bacelona has seduced López Peiró, who is already writing his third novel, “because it is a city rich in history, diversity and culture”.
It was also Balcells “who reinspired me the idea of Barcelona, which was my dream since I was a teenager”, says the Mexican poet and novelist Ale Oseguera, author of Realidad en mono (Aloha). “When I got to know the city, I breathed an air of freedom that I had never felt in my native Guadalajara. Later I debated between Buenos Aires and Santiago, but when I got to know the work of Ballcells, with whom I had the opportunity to have dinner in a petit committee, I returned to the Barcelona dream”, adds the writer who has lived in the Catalan capital since 2006.
Belén and Ale had already felt the bug of letters before settling in Barcelona. But ranco Chiaravalloti explains that “it was the city that made me a writer. When I left Argentina I never imagined that one day I would publish a book and I already have three”. Insular (Three Sisters), is one of them, a volume of stories that perhaps would not have seen the light of day if London were not so expensive: "I wanted to settle in the British capital, but my savings were not enough to live in a such an expensive city I came to Barcelona to save and I've been here for 20 years”.
Chiaravalloti and several of her colleagues have participated in a collective photo for La Vanguardia that was taken on Monday at Casa Amèrica Catalunya, a point of reference and meeting point for Latin American literature in Barcelona, and in other essential places in the city. The Argentinian Verónica Nieto, author of La camarera de Artaud (Trampa Ediciones) also felt that kind of invisible attraction of the city: “In Barcelona you stay, albeit unconsciously. It is a welcoming city and it also continues to be the world's publishing capital,” says Nieto.
Although he has been in the city for many years, the poet Matías Néspolo, author of Antología seca de Green Hills (Emboscall), retains his sweet Argentine accent and agrees with Nieto that "since the boom years Barcelona became the capital of the Latin American literature and that centrality in a certain sense has not been lost, at least in terms of the literary edition in Spanish”.
The poems Biography of birds and With all the distant suns have helped the Ecuadorian Bernardita Maldonado to boost her literary career from Barcelona where she arrived "to meet my son who was studying violin in the city." Maldonado believes like Nieto and Néspolo that "the main publishers are here and that is important for writers."
The Colombian Melba Escobar disagrees and considers that “the vitality as the epicenter of Ibero-American letters that Barcelona had in the eighties, today is in Madrid. The Spanish language has lost its vigor here”. However, Escobar is in love with the Catalan capital and is convinced that “the sky and the light of Barcelona invite you to create”. She just published her latest novel, When We Were Happy and We Didn't Know It (Ariel), and she's already finishing a new book.
Roberto Wong says that his literature "is still nourished by my life in Mexico", but the author of Los recuerdos son pistas, el resto es una ficción, published by the Government of Mexico, is "certain that Barcelona is the city in the one I have lived that I like the most and that best combines the worlds in which I move: the literary, the labor and the Latin American”.
The Dominican Sorayda Peguera says that she arrived in Barcelona by “chance”. “The city chose me and there is something about it that drives me to constantly discover it with new eyes, as if it were the first time each time,” says the author of A Firefly Passed Here (Tusquets).
The Chilean Constanza Ternicier fell in love twice: “the first, from the city, was a crush; the second from a person I met in Barcelona. We always had the idea of going back and here we are again. I don't rule out continuing to move, because I like to experiment, but here I found my place in the world”. She now combines work with the search for a publisher for her third novel after Hamaca (Trojan Horse) and The trajectory of the planes in the air (Comba).
That "crush" is not unusual. Luis Luna Maldonado, who has published among other works Here they only give away parsley (Alfaguara) and Dead under fertile ground (Tusquets), acknowledges that he felt it too. After Cupid's intervention, the Colombian writer decided to stay in Barcelona "because of what he had experienced, because it is a city of manageable size, generous in spaces, with a sea and that can be controlled from a mountain."
And something similar is felt by the Argentine poet, musician, translator and actress Flor Braier who came to Barcelona in 2019 to work on a series by Isabel Coixet and now loves the city “because there are libraries that overlook the forest; because I like places where mixed languages coexist, because I also dream, think and work in Catalan; because there is less rush than in other cities and because it is important to be a little lost in the mountains and also to be able to see a little bit of the sea”.
“In 2006 I was released from prison after serving a sentence for rebellion. I accepted an invitation from the UAB. I had closed my chapter on armed struggle and my desire was to contribute to peace and reconciliation in Colombia”, explains the ex-commander of the Farc Yezid Arteta whose “literary career began in prison and has not stopped since then. In Barcelona I have written three books”.
His compatriot Isabel-Cristina Arenas came to study a master's degree, "but over the years I realized that there were hidden reasons that brought me to Barcelona," says the author of And they were a single shadow (Candaya). Reasons such as "Cobi's cartoons when I was a child, my father's great love for Barça, García Márquez and his life in the city, María dos Prazeces walking through the Gràcia neighborhood and the phrase that I sang so many times with one of my brothers without even knowing what Catalan was: 'Soc de Barcelona i em moro de calor'”.
Wilmar Cabrera came from Colombia to study and “to develop what would be my first novel: The Ghosts of Sarrià Wear Tracksuits (Milenio). A story that revolves around the demolished Espanyol football stadium”. Cabrera was very clear from the outset: “the novel had to be researched, written and published here and not elsewhere, since the mythical match between Italy and Brazil was also involved, played in the same stadium during the World Cup in 1982”.
These are just some of the members of the new Latino-Barcelona boom. There are many more authors settled in the city such as Pola Oloixarac, Juan Manuel Chávez, Bruno Lloret, Cristina Rivera Garza or Fernanda García Lao... And who knows, maybe strolling through Poble Sec, having a wine in the Abirradero, a beer in the Bar Cèntric or participating in Candaya's Fridays you can stumble upon a new future Nobel Prize winner in the Barcelona of the 21st century.
