Empordaguia

Núria Esponellà (Celrà, 1959) is philologist and teacher. She started her literary career as a poet. She has published novels such as Gran café (Columna, 1998), Un moment a la vida (Columna 1999), El mateix amor (City of Badalona Prize, Columna, 2000), Temps de silenci (novel based on a television series, 2002), Sunitha (Columna, Martínez Roca 2003), a novel about adoption in India, and La Travessia (Columna, 2005). She has won various literary prizes, among them the City of Olot prize (1986), the Mercè Bayona prize for her collection of poems Un vent, una mar (Quaderns Crema, 1994), the Goleta i Bergantí prize for La mirada de la gavina, with a forward by Miquel Martí i Pol (Vienna, 2001). She has also won the Bonmatí journalism award and 4th Columna Award for her novel La travessia. Recently she was awarded the Nestor Lujan Prize for Rere els murs.

 She lives in Ventalló, near a cherry orchard that blooms in May and that she enjoys all year. She gets up at six o’clock, walks through the woods and orchards, meditates, practices reiki, and locks herself into her studio to write, waiting for the fickle angel of inspiration. She found a world in conflict: wealth, the fear of death, vanity, and power on the one hand; on the other values such as innocence and the task of immortalizing faith in marble, pardon, love, and a song to life. And the Tramuntana she couldn’t do without entered the pace of her writing.
Núria Esponellà is a writer with passion and dedication who is not afraid of delving deep into her work. She sketches outlines on large sheets of paper, structures her plots, creates personalities and the relations between them, and seeks dramatic effects without hiding the magic of her tremendous imagination. In this way, the last four years came and went, until Rere els murs finally appeared in bookshops; it is an historical novel about one of the most important monasteries of the Middle Ages: Sant Pere de Rodes in the 12th C.
The writer researched with the precision of a surgeon, but also followed the feelings and spirituality she sensed in the monastery. She slept in the ruins for two nights: There is no silence in those walls, the intensity of feeling is frightening. Then she smiles and exclaims: But I had a great time. Now I am exhausted and contented!
Reading Rere els murs, which won the Nestor Luján prize for historical novels, took me to an ancient Empordà full of lakes and rivers. In this world, two local chiefs, Hug III, Count of Empúries, and Jofre I de Rocabertí, Viscount of Perelada, fight each other. Meanwhile, the threatened Abbot Berenguer orders a sculpted portal from Master Cabestany, a famous contemporary sculptor, to welcome the pilgrims f the 1163 Jubilee.
I also wanted to speak of liberty as an interior victory. One of the protagonists, Sebastian, renounces the struggle for power and so pardons himself as well as the world. He shies away from civic life and listens to his inner voice, the Bird, who represents innocence.

Núria is an energetic woman, tall and graceful, dedicated to her family, to literature, and to the spiritual force of nature and landscape. She was a poet, and when she speaks she does so without fear of rules or power. I am disgusted at what is happening to the Empordà: C-31, windmills, developments… This government despises farmers and plans the region from its official cars and offices. It’s shameful.
Where do you see your responsibility?
To write well, to craft language and to research well. It is vital to swim against the current and not to drown in the banalities of society or in the giggles of emotions.
A favourite dish?
Rice with cod.
A Restaurant in the Empordà?
It has to be small, authentic, with home-style cuisine.
An inspiring landscape?
My husband’s orchards by the hills of Ventalló.//PEPE RIBAS