Carme Riera celebrates five decades as a writer with a new book.

We should start from the beginning, perhaps, once again, with the story that gives its title to the book with which so many things began for Carme Riera (Palma, 1948): “Des d'aquí, des de la meva finestra, no puc veure la mar (From here, from my window, I cannot see the sea)”. This is the beginning of Te deix, amor, la mar com a penyora (I leave you, love, the sea as a penyora ), but from the Nixe Palace Hotel in Cala Major, Palma, where the writer has invited us, next to her house, the sea can be seen, between a past storm and an announced storm. Riera is celebrating the 50th anniversary of its publication with a special edition in Catalan, in Edicions 62, and for the first time she has translated it herself into Spanish (Te dejo, amor, en paga el mar ( I leave you, love, as a pledge of the sea ), in Alfaguara).

The anniversary is completed with Gràcies (Edicions 62/Alfaguara), “because we wouldn't be here if there weren't people who have read me from the beginning, and I felt the need to thank them with this little book, which isn't anything out of this world, which aims to explain things in a simple tone, memories and fragments, but not a serious memoir, which perhaps will come one day,” he assures, although he insists that he isn't working on them, as he does have a dystopia about tourists in Mallorca in his head. In front of the hotel, a sign lights up: “Open every day, alcoholic beverages available.” His Mallorca, which he has portrayed so many times, is his Arcadia. Hardly anything remains.

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Two exhibitions will also commemorate the work's fiftieth anniversary, starting on September 19th, when the Nit d'Art is celebrated. The exhibition Carme Riera, l'amor, la mar (Carme, the Sea) , curated by Lucía Garau and Bàrbara Galmés and designed by Antoni Garau, will be on view at the Arxiu del Regne de Mallorca until January 23rd, 2026. The exhibition will attempt to illustrate the work's setting: how she began to read and write, her friends and teachers, the books that influenced her, and the music, cinema, and theater of the period. On the other hand, the Official College of Architects of the Balearic Islands will present the installation by visual artist Pep Llambías Vessant Amor , in collaboration with the writer herself and curated by Montse Torras, which transforms the exhibition hall into a space for dialogue between literature and contemporary art, with an installation that plays with words, silences, mirrors, nostalgia, the color blue, love and death.

Riera reviews her career and recalls the beginning, when she showed her stories to the much-missed Guillem Frontera and advised him to take them to Laia publishing house. She did so in February 1975, thinking that if they didn't reject them, it would take months for them to say anything: to her surprise, on Sant Jordi's Day she was already patiently waiting on the Rambla, where she only managed to sell one. Through word of mouth, she made her way and has surpassed 40 editions, and still does. What was the secret? The author doesn't know, but "as I reread it, I thought there was a lot of intensity in the text, and perhaps it also had to do with the fact that it spoke of love between women, which was as if it didn't exist, and I think it was the first time it was done in Catalan, in such an open way, and it conveyed a very youthful and fresh emotion. But I hadn't gone to any writing school, of course, I had only read." Curiously, there wasn't much talk about a fifteen-year-old girl having an affair with her teacher... "It's true, and look, that's always happened, I myself married one of my teachers..."

“Pere Gimferrer gave me literature classes and Joan Vinyoli asked me to come down to the bar.”

In fact, as she explains in her new book, reading was very difficult for her—“the nuns said maybe I was retarded”—but poetry made her a reader: “My father read me Rubén Darío’s Sonatina , and I liked it so much that I wanted to read it again.” Then came the letters she sent to her friends during a long period of sore throats, and so it took off. Without little chapels or schools, but with some friends. “I’ve always been pretty independent, but in Barcelona, ​​while studying for my degree, I became good friends with Ana María Moix and Pere Gimferrer, who would pick me up from college every afternoon in a taxi and take me to a café and give me literature lessons, like private lessons, and I learned a lot.” At one time, she frequented the poet Joan Vinyoli, a neighbor: “He would call me and say, ‘Come down to the bar, I’m very sad.’ He was a lovely man.”

Her literature often touches on identity, a particularly pointed issue because she's a Mallorcan living in Barcelona, ​​a writer in Catalan who teaches literature in Spanish, and on top of that, she's a member—the vice president—of the Royal Spanish Academy: "For many Spaniards, I'm Catalan, and for many Catalans, I'm Spanish. Since I'm not an independent, some have even sent me letters saying they won't read me anymore. That angered me, because I have friends of all kinds, and ideology seems like a huge nonsense to me; I'm interested in people. Whose is Catalan? It's ours, for the independents and for those of us who aren't." “But it's not a bad life, on the border. Sometimes you get hit by a stray bullet from one side or the other, but I have the enormous luxury of having two languages, and I will defend them fiercely,” she insists, even though she has always written in Catalan since she had Aina Moll as a teacher: “I was devoted to her, and if it hadn't been for her, perhaps I would have written in Spanish, which Carmen Balcells would have loved, she always told me, who was also very important, and that's why I wrote her biography.”