Antoni Ferrer Perales (l'Alcúdia de Crespins, la Costera, 1943-2022) is a poet and literary critic. He has been a secondary school teacher and a priest.

With a degree in Philosophy and Philology, he was prompted by his sense of social commitment to encourage education in the towns where he was a priest and, subsequently, to work towards overhauling learning processes as a secondary school teacher. At this stage of his life he left the priesthood.

Since 1976 he has worked with the magazine Saó, first as a writer and, after two years, as a member of the editorial board. He also writes for other magazines, among them Reduccions, Passadís, Caràcters and L’Aiguadolç.

His writing skills were evident from an early age and he very soon started to receive his first literary prizes. In 1978, he was awarded the Ausiàs March Prize for Poetry with Fragmentos con figuras para un vaso minoico. His poetry represents a kind of continuity which becomes an instrument of self-knowledge and a way of interpreting the world. Hence, in this religious and layman’s humanist framework one finds among his works Cant espiritual (1992) and Cant temporal (2000), while his collection Cançó de bressol per ajudar a benmorir galàxies (1986) is a poetic approximation to modern-day science. Elsewhere, for example in his Variacions Goldberg (2015), winner of the Critics’ Prize for Poetry Writers of Valencia, music is a reference.

He has also written texts for a number of cantatas and oratorios by Valencian composers.

In 2015, seventy-seven poets contributed to the book published in his honour, Els déus no abandonen Antoni.

Antoni Ferrer was a member of Associació d'Escriptors en Llengua Catalana (AELC – Association of Catalan Language Writers).



Web page: Francesc Viñas for AELC.
Documentation: author’s personal files.
Translated by Julie Wark.