Pedro Zarraluki has died in Girona at age 70, according to his literary agency this Sunday in a statement. The Barcelona writer leaves a great literary legacy after a career as a novelist and story writer that began in the 70s and has been recognized with several awards, including Herralde, in 1990, by The History of Silenceand Nadal, in 2005, with A difficult order.
In Barcelona, he was actively known in cultural life, for example, running Salambó Café, baptized as a Flaubert novel, which he founded, in postolimpic times, with the writer Francisco Gracia and the famous literary agent Carmen Balcells. Iconic place of the Gràcia neighborhood, surrounded by Verdi cinemas, habitual refuge of letter wrapped, cinephiles and pool players, where he created a literary prize with the same name. He was a collaborator of the Catalan edition of El País.
Born in Barcelona on December 31, 1954, Zarraluki published his first novel, The tenth symphonyin 1979. His first foray into the writing of stories was in 1983, with Enormities Gallery. Among its literary production, novels stand out THE NIGHT OF THE TROMOYISTA (1996), The head of the frogs (1990), The History of Silence (1994), Hotel Astoria (1997), For lovers and thieves (2000) y A difficult orderon the Spanish postwar period, for which he received the Nadal Prize in 2005. The thesis of the latter was in his own words: “The world in which we live depends more on generosity, integrity and delivery of certain individuals who govern us laws,” as he declared in an interview with this newspaper.
Zarraluki considered literature a mixture of passion and “vampirization” of the environment, in which the writer becomes “a thief who observes the environment, appropriates him and returns him in his stories.” Admirer of Russian authors Antón Chekhov or Vladimir Nabokov, his works were translated into several languages such as Italian, French, Russian or Greek. Writing “is getting into a story for a long time, sometimes, for several years” and “is having a double life,” he said. I thought that writing stories “is like creating perfumes.”
Regarding Salambó, “it was a romantic idea, to make a coffee that was one of the greats, of those who were disappearing, where you could have coffee, a mojito or some lentils …”, he told this newspaper. Together with his partner, he sought to have a business that worked: “That he gave us a salary so as not to be overwhelmed by money and be able to dedicate ourselves to ours, in my case to write.”
He published his latest novel in 2021, The curve of obliviona story that placed in the Ibizan summer of 1968 and in which he faced two generations with their fears, hopes and problems. He finished giving the last stitches to the text during the confinement for the Covid, when he enjoyed spending time in Ibiza. In the novel it was stated that parents “can only be worse”, but that youth is not easy either: “They are facing a tremendous emptiness: they have the need to choose their future too soon and face a different perspective than ours. Those who looked back had a relative well -being: I had a Pisazo In the Eixample and could pay it with the four harsh he won. Now the problem of access to housing or work is scandalous, ”said the author in another interview with this newspaper.
Zarraluki usually collaborated in newspapers and radios. He was a professor at the Barcelona Athenaeum School. In addition to Nadal, he was also recognized with the Margarita Xirgu Exterior Prize for Spain for radio theater scripts (1988) by Portrait on a boat. In 1990 he won the Ciudad de Barcelona and Critical Eye of the National Radio of Spain (RNE) both for The head of the frogs and in 1994 the Herralde by The History of Silenceshared with The double city by Carlos Perellón.