It was only two months ago that Rosa Regàs presented her latest book, entitled A legacy. The adventure of a lifetime (Navona), where she looked back to leave her last words written in a living testament where she reflects on her career in literature and thought. The presentation took place in her house in Llofriu, where she had been sheltered for years, in a place near the sea that inspired one of her great novels, Azul, with which she won the Nadal Prize in its 50th edition. Today, at 90 years of age, in the same house and near the same sea, she has reached the end of an intense life, surrounded by her large family and friends.
With Regàs, an author with multiple faces disappears: editor, writer, translator, former general director of the National Library, Legion of Honor of the French Republic and Creu de Sant Jordi, Planeta and Nadal awards and woman of the gauche divine. Above all, however, he lived as he pleased and could, and he explained it this way: “Whenever I could and when I was young, I lied all day long to be able to do what I wanted,” he explained in an interview with EL PAÍS two years ago.
Regàs was the daughter of the playwright Xavier Regàs i Castells and Mariona Pagès. Born in Barcelona in 1933, she lived through the French Civil War at the school run by the French pedagogue Célestin Freinet and his wife in Vence. Upon her return, she studied Philosophy and Literature and graduated in Philosophy from the University of Barcelona. In 1951, she married the photographer Eduard Omedes Rogés, with whom she had five children.
Regàs worked at Seix Barral from 1964 to 1970, when he decided to found the publishing house La Gaya Ciencia, and the magazines Arquitecturas Bis y Cuadornments of the Gay Science (From 1983 to 1994 she worked as a translator at the United Nations in Geneva and New York. In 1987, at the suggestion of Carlos Trías Sagnier, who was then directing the collection, she was invited to work as a translator at the United Nations in Geneva and New York. Cities by Destino Editions, wrote Ginebraan essay on the Calvinist capital of Lake Geneva and its peculiar inhabitants. In 1991 he published Memory of Almatorher first book of fiction, in which a woman overprotected by her father, her husband and her lover ends up taking the reins of her life. In 1994 she won the Nadal Prize with the novel Azula love story that was a great success with the public. It was followed by Journey to the light of Cham (1995), narration of his experiences in Syria, and Moon Moon (1999), an autobiographical novel set in Barcelona during the post-war period.
In 2001, he won the Planeta Prize with a thriller novel, Dorotea’s songwhich tells of the discoveries that a professor of molecular biology makes in a country house that she had inherited from her father. Since then she has published more works, among which stands out Diary of a summer grandmother (2005). From 2004 to 2007 he directed the National Library. His differences with the then Minister of Culture, César Antonio Molina, led to his departure from the National Library and his retirement from Ampurdán.
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