The writer Ildefonso Falcones, author supervants of The sea cathedral And other novels, he has denounced in Italy that he has been excluded “for political reasons” from the list of 69 writers who will represent Catalonia at the Guadalajara Book Fair (FIL), which begins on November 29 and where the Autonomous Community is invited to honor. In telephone conversation with El País, he confirms that he feels “tremendously disappointed” for the decision, when he has sold more than 14 million books and four of his novels take place in Barcelona: “I do not think there is a writer who has written more novels about Barcelona and that he had more worldwide impact.” Falcones has made it public in a long conversation published this Sunday in the cultural supplement of the Corriere della Seraafter receiving a prize in Pordenone, and attributes the exclusion to write and speak in Spanish since he is “a father with four boys, heterosexual, white, Christian, liberal.”
The writer, known for his position against independence, but who does not mention it among the reasons he lists so as not to have been selected, he believes that it is a “deliberate invisibility.” Therefore, he concludes that his city “does not love me as a writer” and declares himself “literary stateless”: “as things are, I think I no longer consider myself Barcelona.” “I assume the invisibility, the cancellation they have done to me, I don’t want to know anything else,” he explains to this newspaper. On a hypothetical rectification, he adds: “I don’t even wait for her, I don’t want her either, nor will there.” In any case, he says, “I don’t want to discuss politics.”
Barcelona City Council sources replicate that the person responsible for the selection of writers, the journalist Anna Guitart, “was appointed curator of the FIL for her career and solvency, and is developing her functions with absolute political and editorial independence.” “The list of authors and authors that has made to be part of the representation of Barcelona to the FIL support it,” they conclude, reports Carlota Rubio.
In the list released in June by Guitart there are other well -known Catalan authors, and some are not independence and write only in Spanish. Falcones is aware of this and quotes Javier Cercas, Eduardo Mendoza, Carme Riera or the Irish Colm Tibin, who lived in Barcelona and wrote a book about the city: “They are level authors, which I estimate. But the others? Little known writers. I do not take it with them, but at 66 I do not support this climate of small revenge, of skirmish.” He believes that in the FIL “independence and activists of all genres” and that the culture “will be instrumentalized” to propose claims will rise to the scenario.
In the presentation of the list in June, Guitart explained that one of the conditions for the national team has been that the authors had their work in Spanish and that it has also been tried to avoid repeating writers who had gone the year before the FIL, because Spain was the country invited in 2024. Falcones was not one of them, it did not go to Guadalajara. Moreover, he regrets a general institutional oblivion: “No one has ever invited me to anything. Well, last year they called me a month before the Frankfurt Fair, someone said they had not invited me and then, running and rapted they told me that they invited me. I told them no, this is not so, it is not the form, they are not the forms,” he explains to this newspaper.
Guitart pointed out in his presentation that in the list there are supervent authors, such as Xavier Bosch and Regina Rodríguez Sirvent, in addition to those already mentioned, but also others less known in Mexico such as Elisenda Solsona, Kiko Amat or Eduard Olesti. Also poets such as Adrià Targa, Josep Pedrals or Juana Dolores; playwrights like Sergi Belbel; and writers of trajectories recognized as Mercè Ibarz or Rafael Argullol. As guests of honor, Eduardo Mendoza and Joan Manuel Serrat will attend.
However, for Falcones it has been striking that “nobody has raised their hand” to point out their absence. “I am not willing to accept that a commission considers my presence in Guadalajara inadequate to represent Barcelona literature, taking into account that only in Mexico I have sold 380,000 copies. I am no longer willing to listen to judgments of this type,” reasons the writer in the Italian newspaper. He points out that criticism has never cared, but readers, and that is why he believes that his absence in the FIL is “an insult to Mexican readers.” He adds that he expects his words to reach the readers of this country and Italy, where he has also sold thousands of books, ”because I can’t stand that they think they have uselessly read the books of a writer who nobody considers.”
In the presentation of the Delegation of Writers, together with the mayor of Barcelona, the socialist Jaume Collboni, Commissioner Anna Guitart declared that the objective is to “explain the current literary Barcelona, as if the people who write in Barcelona or Barcelona in Barcelona in any language in front of the cathedral were convened and we took a photo.”