Elvira Augusta Lewi (Barcelona, 1909 - ? ca.1970)

A writer, journalist, and translator from a Jewish family, she studied at the German School of Barcelona and at La Llotja School of Arts and Trades. When she was sixteen, she wrote her first (unpublished) novel and, after 1929, she began to work as a journalist writing for several magazines and newspapers. She published her first story “L’home de cristal” in D’Ací d’Allà and, from 1931 until it closed, she was art critic for the daily La Nau. From 1933 to 1938, she wrote for the magazine La Dona Catalana, with interviews and articles on decoration, fashion, art, and women’s education. She also translated for La Revista (1931) some letters from the correspondence of the poets Hölderlin and Rilke.

She published the novel Un poeta i dues dones (1935), written in a style that is somewhere between psychological realism and fantasy, as well as a collection of short stories titled Els habitants del pis 200 (1936), which was reissued in 2023.

Apart from the publication of her novel in Spanish, after 1943 nothing is known of her personal and literary life in the years following the Spanish Civil War and also those of Nazism.

Web page: Francesc Viñas for AELC.
Photograph: Pérez de Rozas (Photographic Archive of Barcelona).
Translation: Julie Wark.