Agustí Segarra (Barcelona, 1945), a qualified industrial technician with a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Barcelona, has worked as a university lecturer, a private teacher, publisher and cultural manager.

As a result of his studies of the history of public thought, he has published several works on the history of anarchism, including El pensament anarquista a Catalunya (1976) and Federico Urales y Ricardo Mella, teóricos del anarquismo español (1977). He also took part in the Nova Cançó (New Song) movement and, subsequently, with an interest in independent theatre, he became an actor and director.

He began his literary career as a finalist of the Documenta Prize with the intimist novel Refugi entre boires (1989), which explores the ego’s deep knowledge through the privations and frustrations of a generation conditioned by the conventionalisms of the epoch into which they are born. His second novel, La Vall dels Forcats (1992), which has a psychoanalytic background, sets an eminently urban man against a rural setting, with some allusions to the Catalan novel of the early twentieth century. In 1998 he published the novel El bosc subterrani, which resembles a brightly coloured altarpiece with ironic, critical reflections on a society in which men and women struggle to coexist, sometimes comically and sometimes calamitously. In 2005, he was awarded the Joaquim Amat-Piniella Prize for La ciutat en flames (2006), a historical novel portraying human ambition against the convulsive backdrop of the city of Barcelona at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the Franco dictatorship. In 2017 he published his fifth novel, Rendició a la neu.

Segarra is a member of Associació d'Escriptors en Llengua Catalana (Association of Catalan Language Writers – AELC).



Documentation and texts: Agustí Segarra.
Web page: Josep Miàs for AELC.
Photographs: © Marc Almodóvar.
Translated by Julie Wark.