Behind the culture, the emotion and vital intensity that it arouses, there are only people with their first name, their place of birth and their tastes for free time. It is the extraordinary works they have created and the recognition they have gained that set them apart from other mortals.
These special people are the true protagonists of this book that, in addition to working as a guide and prescriber –not in vain Sergio Vila-Sanjuán is one of the most outstanding cultural journalists in the country–, makes them accessible. Hand in hand with him we approach them, we talk, we reach some secret or some succulent detail, and we are allowed to glimpse the cave where, as one of the protagonists says, "the most prosaic reality becomes fantasy".
Writers (Margaret Atwood, Gabriel García Márquez, Susan Sontag, Arturo Pérez-Reverte or Mario Vargas Llosa, in his theater facet), journalists (Tom Wolfe, Ryszard Kapuscinski...), painters (Miquel Barceló, Joan Ponç...) and figures from other disciplines (Ricardo Bofill, Peter Berger...) follow one another in stimulating profiles that, paraphrasing another of those portrayed, illuminate a career better than ten doctoral theses.
Sergio Vila-Sanjuán has a degree in History and a Master's degree in Liberal Arts at Boston University with a Fulbright scholarship. Since 1987 he has worked at La Vanguardia, where he currently directs the supplement Cultura / s. Specialist in the world of books and literary information, he has published journalistic essays such as Turning the page. Authors and publishers in democratic Spain, The Frankfurt Syndrome, Code best seller or Barcelona, the city of books, and the biography El Joven Porcel. In 2004 he compiled a selection of his Cultural Chronicles, which continued in 2013 with La cultura y la vida.
He is the author of the novels Una heiress de Barcelona, It was in the air (2013 Nadal award) and The Casabona report, and the plays El club de la escala y La agent literary. He was curator of the 2005 Book and Reading Year and has organized anthological painting exhibitions such as Avant-garde Realism or Realism in Catalonia. He is a member of the Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona, winner of the National Award for Cultural Journalism and the Giménez-Frontín award for dialogue between cultures.
