Catalonia: Place of a Language - World Literature Weekend 2011
Friday 17 June 2011, 7 p.m. · 69 minutes![](https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/storage/300_filter/images/2/0/4/9/529402-9-eng-GB/52790553c1f41.jpg 300w, https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/storage/400_filter/images/2/0/4/9/529402-9-eng-GB/52790553c1f41.jpg 400w, https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/storage/800_filter/images/2/0/4/9/529402-9-eng-GB/52790553c1f41.jpg 800w, https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/storage/1200_filter/images/2/0/4/9/529402-9-eng-GB/52790553c1f41.jpg 1200w)
Three very different Catalan writers came together to talk about how a besieged language can offer refuge, and how place, history and identity are knitted into that language. Najat El Hachmi’s semi-autobiographical novel The Last Patriarch describes how the daughter of a domineering Moroccan father, growing up in urban Catalonia, is able to forge her own identity through the discovery of the Catalan language. Teresa Solana is the award-winning author of two comic noirs that satirise Catalan politics and literary society, A Not So Perfect Crime and A Short Cut to Paradise. Carles Casajuana is the author of The Last Man who Spoke Catalan (not yet translated into English), a comic novel that pits two writers, one Catalan and one Castilian, the last inhabitants of a deserted apartment building, against one another as rivals in language and love. Our chair for this event was Barcelona-based literary translator Peter Bush, who has translated both Najat El-Hachmi and Teresa Solana.