Empar Beatriu Martínez i Civera (València, 1914-1995), writing under the pen name of Beatriu Civera, was a key figure in the recovery of fiction in the Valencian Community in the 1950s, in particular with the publication of her short stories in the magazine Pensat i fet. She was the first woman to publish in a Valencian newspaper and, specifically, in the daily La Voz Valenciana, as well as being the first in Valencia to publish a novel in Catalan.

Notable among her novels are Entre el cel i la terra (1956), Una dona com una altra (1961), and a still-unpublished work titled La crida indefugible for which she received the 1969 Joan Senent Prize. This was not her only unpublished but prize-winning work. She was a finalist for the 1958 Valencia Award with Liberata and, later, for the 1974 October Awards, with Vells i novells.

In 1961, she received the Víctor Català prize for the short story collection Vides alienes, a work that was to mark a before and after for her, as she subsequently began to write for the weekly publication El Temps. Her last book, Confidencial, also a collection of short stories, was published in 1986.

Born into a middle-class family, she always opted for Catalan as her language of literary creation, even in times of political and linguistic repression. As a socially committed writer and together with Manuel Sanchis Guarner, she was secretary of the Valencian cultural society Lo Rat Penat, and also archivist for the publisher L’Editorial 3 i 4.

Web page: Álvaro Muñoz Hernández for AELC.
Documentation: Yasmina Ribera, “Beatriu Civera: una dona com una altra?”, La Lectora, 2020; Raquel González; Bàrbara Muñoz; Yasmina Ribera, “La València de Beatriu Civera”, master’s degree dissertation in Catalan Language Teaching in Secondary Education, at the University of Valencia, 2018.
Photograph: Escriptores Valencianes.
Translation: Julie Wark.