Miquel Bauçà (Felanitx, Mallorca, 1940 – Barcelona, 2005), a poet and narrative writer was renowned for his verbal and social radicalism. He received the 1961 Salvat-Papasseit Prize for his work Una bella història (A Beautiful Story), the debut book of a young talent that dazzled the critics. He received other awards for later works, for example the 1974 Vicent Andrés Estellés Prize for Notes i comentaris (Notes and Comments) and the 1985 City of Barcelona Prize for Carrer Marsala (Marsala Street). The latter work, his first book in prose, marked a turning point in the critics’ reception of his writing. He had now become a writer of reference for those who wished to find a kind of literature that was committed to an integral idea of the human being and, thenceforth, efforts were made to try to draw him into a system that he always rejected one way or another. Hence, although he received the prestigious Sant Joan (Saint John) Prize for his novel L'estuari (The Estuary) in 1989, he never felt that he was part of the literary milieu of his times. He also published the fictional work El canvi (The Change, 1997), an innovative collection of writings structured in the form of a dictionary, and Els somnis (Dreams, 2002), amongst other books.

In the last years of his life he removed himself even more from everyday realities, but this never prompted him to abandon his writing, an oeuvre which is among the most original and intense to come out of the 1970s literary generation. Miquel Bauçà died on 3 January 2005, leaving behind an unclassifiable literary corpus, which has unquestionably expanded the bounds of contemporary Catalan literature.

He was a member of the Association of Catalan Language Writers (AELC).


Web page: X. R. Trigo for AELC.
Texts: Xavier Gual.
Photographs: AELC files.