In a photograph taken in the first decade of this century that sought to bring together the most relevant figures of publishing in Spain, the presence of a young woman, the only one to pose squatting, whose smile seemed to hide the satisfaction of having become a gap between giants. Her name was Diana Zaforteza and she had earned it hard from the conviction that a modest label had a lot to contribute. Pioneer in materializing the dream that the growing concentration in the Spanish literary market could be balanced with a myriad of small and combative publishing houses, where the lack of resources, trajectory and image was compensated with enthusiasm, tenacity and care, died yesterday in a hospital from Barcelona at just 44 years old, a victim of cancer.
The love for books was instilled in her from a very young age by her father, the Majorcan businessman José Zaforteza Delgado, who in a way removed the thorn from his frustrated aspiration to become a publisher by helping his friend Jorge Herralde launch, at the end of the 1960s, the Anagram stamp. This was where Zaforteza, after studying Humanities in Barcelona, took her first professional steps, got to know the ins and outs of the trade and weaved a golden network of contacts, including those of the super agents Carmen Balcells and Andrew Wilye, who would advise and help her. on their own adventures. The first of these would come in 2004 when, together with Enric Cucurella, he would launch the Alpha Decay publishing house, which had already established the scales of quality, risk and design care, among other differential elements, which would define a vision and a procedure from which they would later draw. multitude of literary projects.
Four years later he would found the Alfabia label alone, an example of eclecticism and courage that as soon as he relaunched Majorcan authors or forgotten classics that he bet on rarities of the fantastic genre or stories in small-format books. Although economic difficulties forced it to close in 2016, when reality slammed against this publisher's statement of intent, "For me this is a vocational job, something I dreamed of. Now what I have left is to make my romanticism profitable ”, we can only praise those who put together a catalog capable of harmonizing letters by Saul Bellow or reading notes by Wislawa Szymborska with oddities by Lou Reed, or Leonard Cohen, who discovered the literary facet of Paolo Sorrentino or novelists as large as David Vann or George Saunders, who rescued Bearn or Llorenç Villalonga's doll room as soon as the hallucinated stories of Lord Dunsany, who gave voice to Pat Hackett, Andy Warhol's secretary, or detected the talent of Daniel Gascón, Víctor Balcells or Diego Gándara Towards the latter, by the way, he made an unusual gesture of generosity when he reopened Alfabia in 2019 to make room for his novel Single Movement, demonstrating for the umpteenth time that the edi It was for her an irresistible act of passion, need and delivery.
“I publish books that should remain in libraries, not shooting stars or from a certain moment. I release what I think should last”, declared Diana Zaforteza, whose legacy will also include having contributed to building the confidence of every small label that dreams big and reminding us all that without a hint of daring, madness and romanticism our literary panorama would be as sad as the emptiness left by his early departure.
