Joan Sales (Barcelona, 1912- 1983) was a novelist, poet, translator and publisher. After a nine-year exile he became one of the most dedicated publishers in the revitalisation of Catalan culture in the period following the Civil War. In 1955, he founded the "Club dels Novel.listes", a collection of the Club Editor, a publishing house of which he was a co-founder, in which appeared some of the most outstanding achievements in post-war Catalan narrative, books such as Mercè Rodoreda's La plaça del Diamant (The Time of the Doves, in the English title) and Llorenç de Villalonga's Bearn. His most ambitious work was Incerta glòria (Uncertain Glory), published in 1956, having been severely mutilated by the censors, and which received the Joanot Martorell Prize in 1955. The definitive edition, in 1969, was of more than 800 pages and was awarded, amongst other prizes, the Ramon Llull Prize (1968), and the Ciutat de Barcelona (City of Barcelona) Prize in 1970. In 1976 he published the epistolary collection Cartes a Màrius Torres (Letters to Màrius Torres) 1936 - 1941, a work which contributed interesting material for better understanding of the natures of the two writers in the rarefied atmosphere of the Catalonia of the time. He was a member of the Associació d'Escriptors en Llengua Catalana (Association of Catalan Language Writers).


Documentation: Jordi Ferrer.
Up-date: Carme Ros.
Translation: Julie Wark.
Photos: Maria Folch de Sales ©.