All the authors I discuss in this chapter are still alive at the time of writing. Some, like Martí i Pol and Perucho, produced the bulk of their work in the last century but are still continuing to add to it; others, like Moncada, have only begun to write in the last twenty years or so and have a promising career ahead of them. Moreover, I have had to be very selective: at the moment, there are at least two dozen poets worth reading, and the same goes for the novelists and, to a slightly lesser extent, for the theatre writers. To have mentioned all of these would have prolonged this chapter out of all proportion; alternatively, to have reduced them to mere lists would hardly have enlightened the reader and only served to confuse him. In the end, therefore, I have been forced to compromise: I have concentrated on what seem to me the most interesting writers, all too conscious that others would have deserved mention in a longer account.

Poetry

Miquel Martí i Pol (b. 1929) has often been associated with the mode of ‘social realism’ fashionable in the 1960s, but this is far too limiting and in many ways inaccurate. After an early religious phase which came to a crisis in the poems of El fugitiu(The Fugitive; 1952–7), he began to write about ordinary people, and in particular those otherwise anonymous men and women he saw as trapped in the routines of industry. This is the closest he comes to ‘social realism’, but even here there are differences: above all, as is clear from the two sequences entitled La fàbrica–1959(The Factory; 1958–9) and La fàbrica(1970–1), he writes as one who works in the factory himself and, as a result, can empathize with his fellow-workers in a way which is foreign to most other ‘social realist’ poets. Nevertheless, there is a certain distancing which enables him to avoid the faults – sentimentality, paternalism – of much poetry of this kind. As he himself once said: