Núria Añó


Núria Añó is a Catalan writer, a translator, and a speaker at conferences and symposia, where she gives papers on literary creation or authors like Elfriede Jelinek, Patricia Highsmith, Salka Viertel, Franz Werfel, Karen Blixen or Alexandre Dumas, fils.
Añó started writing tales at a young age and published her first story in 1990. After that some of her short stories have been published in internationals anthology books. Her fiction story 2066. Comença l'etapa de correcció or Presage, about domestic violence, both are translated into English. Also some articles and essays such as The Mother Tongue in Foreign Lands or about the city of Shanghai A Catalyst City for Creativity are translated into Spanish, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Chinese, Latvian or Dutch.
Her first novel Els nens de l'Elisa was third among the finalists for the 24th Ramon Llull Prize for Catalan literature, one of the most relevant literary awards in Catalan language. L'escriptora morta about the process of literary creation was published in 2008 and Núvols baixos about a bisexual mature actress with LGBT background among other plots such as Alzheimer's disease, in 2009. La mirada del fill, a novel about adoption, generational troubles between mothers and daughters and classic ballet dancer was published in 2012. Today, some of her novels are translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French or Dutch as well. According to several academic journals of literature, Añó's work is considered "one of the big promises of the contemporary narrative for Catalan Literature.".
Her last work is a biography on Jewish scriptwriter and intellectual Salka Viertel El salon de los artistas exiliados en California. It is the result of three years of research about the Berlin of the 1920s; the transition from silent to spoken film in Hollywood. Then, the rise of Hitler and what it meant for the Jewish condition; the exile of many European artists because of the Second World War. Later, the Cold War and the witch-hunt against communism.

Style

Añó's writing style is very ambitious and risky, the author delves into the exploration of the contemporary individual, it focuses on the psychology of her characters, generally antiheroes avoiding Manichaeism. "The characters are the most important" in her books, "much more than the topic", due to "an introspection, a reflection, not sentimental, but feminine". Although her novels cover a multitude of topics, treat actual and socially relevant problems, injustices and poor communication between people. Frequently, the core of her stories remains unexplained and Núria Añó asks the reader to discover the "deeper meaning" and to become involved in the events presented.

Awards

In 1996 she was awarded the 18th City of Almenara Joan Fuster Prize for Fiction. In 2016 she was distinguished by the culture association Nuoren Voiman Liitto in Sysmä, Finland. Later, she won a grant at the Shanghai Writing Program, in Shanghai, China. In 2017 she was distinguished by the Baltic Centre for Writers and Translators in Visby, Sweden. Late in the fall, by International Writer's and Translators' Center of Rhodes in Greece. In 2018 she was selected for the residency Krakow UNESCO City of Literature in Poland and she won the fourth international writing award 2018 Shanghai Get-Together. In 2019 she was distinguished by IWTH in Ventspils, Latvia.

Novels

Novels translated into other languages