Mercè Carandell i Robusté (Barcelona, 1948) was born in carrer Provença, between Rambla Catalunya and Passeig de Gràcia, in a building where her father had his law firm. It also housed the Carandell Economics Library, which is presently installed at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. With a sudden change of fortune in 1952, the family moved to a farm near Reus, after which they went to live in Madrid in 1957 owing to her father’s professional commitments, and then returned to Barcelona in 1962. Wherever they were, the Carandell family was always fully engaged with the cultural milieu, both before and after the Civil War.

Mercè Carandell studied Medicine from 1965 to 1971, with a year in Cambridge in the middle of her studies. A specialist in internal medicine and rheumatology, she has worked in several Barcelona hospitals. During stays in Madrid and at Leeds General Infirmary in Yorkshire, she also specialised in mineral metabolism.

She is a daughter of Joan Carandell Marimon, a lawyer by profession and founder of the Carandell Economics Library. Moreover, she is a sister of Luís Carandell (also a writer, who publishes in Spanish), Josep Maria Carandell, Cristian Carandell (a translator from Greek and winner of the 1987 Josep Maria de Segarra Prize), and Teresa Carandell (a poet who writes in English).

Her great-uncle, Rafel Carandell Paretas, was an Empordanese writer in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and, on her mother’s side, she is a niece of the writer Eloi Robusté Rosés, author of several essays and the novel, Sasha, for which Josep Pla wrote the Prologue. Furthermore, Eloi Robusté appears in Pla’s book of a hundred portraits of personalities from the world of culture, Retrats de pasaport. She is also a sister-in-law of José Agustín Goytisolo, a poet of the Generació del 50 (Fifties Generation).

As a writer, she received the 1996 Eugeni Molero Award for Journalism from the Garraf Regional Council for a series of stories that were published under the heading “Vist en consulta” in the weekly publication Hora del Garraf. Moreover, this weekly and the Garraf Regional Council published an anthology of her articles in a book titled Històries de malalts, which features in the “Llibres de l’Arc” collection. In 2019 she published El Paradís rere el mar (Letra Minúscula), a historical novel about Catalans who went to Cuba, for which she travelled several times to the Caribbean, Liverpool, and the Canary Islands.

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

Web page: Clara Bara Palma for AELC.
Photographs: Author’s personal files.
Translated by Julie Wark.