Jacobé & fineta

Joaquim Ruyra was a Catalan short-story writer, poet and translator, considered a key figure in modern Catalan literature and one of the great narrators of the 20th century. He was in the vanguard of the Catalan Modernist generation as they constructed a new literary model after 1860, when the Catalan language became the vehicle of cultural nationalism. Although he did not produce a large body of work, his short stories set a stylistic benchmark for Catalan literature, including the shaping of a “landscape canon”.

Alan Yates, born in Northampton in 1944, studied Modern Languages at the University of Cambridge. From 1968 he taught in the Department of Hispanic Studies at the University of Sheffield where he was promoted in 1990 to a personal Chair in Catalan Studies. Early retirement in 1999 enabled him to cultivate his enthusiasm for literary translation (exclusively Catalan-English), for which he has been awarded various distinctions.