The reporter and writer Bru Rovira (Barcelona, 1955) debuts in the novel with a police intrigue that helps him intertwine conspiracies from politics and journalism in the same story. In an exercise of irony and disbelief – “I describe a very unintellectual world in which even the character who wants to intellectualize is of a frightening banality” – the former La Vanguardia journalist portrays in Killing the Director (Navona) an era of change in his profession.
“For me, the epiphanic moment of the paradigm shift in television is the case of the Alcàsser girls, with Nieves Herrero saying 'let's move on to advertising.' There begins an era in which the separation between spectacle, popular press and information disappears. Those in journalism who were dedicated to entertaining and distracting took over the information there, they replaced it,” says Rovira.
The author of Africas or The Map of the World of Our Lives, who for 25 years covered wars and social issues in this newspaper, until in 2009, “still in top form,” he felt expelled from reporting, is here transmuted into a policewoman, former journalist, who returns to the profession of investigation and curiosity about the human factor. “I have a lot of fun taking on that alter ego, someone who continues to have a journalistic position,” says the Ortega y Gasset and Miguel Gil Moreno winner. Many details of the novel are, she says, extracted from her experiences as a journalist.
“My novel goes through the secondary. I have always been in love with the secondary, with what is not seen. Because in the end you realize that we live in a world in which we believe we are informed, but what there is is great banality and many angry people who, as happens in my novel, end up exploding, although not over Ukraine or Gaza, but rather for any everyday thing.” “I am nostalgic, yes,” he concludes, “but for a world that will never return. “They replaced my generation with lower salaries, now they are replaced by algorithms.”
