Jordi Bordas i Coca (Barcelona, 1943). Teacher, writer and translator. 

Born in 1943, the author grows up after the Spanish Civil War. Some school and high school teachers transmit him the passion for reading and writing. In his youth he decides to write in his mother tongue, Catalan. He makes his debut as a writer with poetry, a genre in which he is awarded with the second prize ex aequo at the Mossèn Amadeu Oller contest (1966). He studies Law at the University of Barcelona but decides to work as an English teacher for private language academies.

During the 60s and the 70s he is in contact with the Barcelona’s alternative theatre scene: he founds El Camaleó —a popular an anti-Francoist theatre group— and becomes a member of the Grup de Teatre Independent, for which translates pieces by Maxim Gorki or Arnold Wesker. He writes La Terra es belluga, a work for young people that wins the prize Serra d’Or of theatre (1970). The author participates actively in the final years of the Franco regime, a moment of cultural, political and literary effervescence.

Due to the familiar and labour life, Jordi Bordas i Coca stops writing for three decades. But some years later he returns to it again, this time mainly centred in the narrative: he writes short stories awarded with prizes as the Emili Teixidor, the Joan Fuster d’Almenara or the Ramon Juncosa, and in 2011 he publishes his first novel, D’esquena al sol. After it, he publishes Comptabilitat domèstica o el misteri de la cambra tancada (2014) and Un teacher a Barcelona (2017).

He is an honorary member of the Associació d’Escriptors en Llengua Catalana (AELC - Association of Catalan Language Writers).

Web page: Cinta Paloma for AELC.
Documentation and photographs: author’s personal files.
Translation: Cinta Paloma.