Teresa Juvé (Madrid, 1921), a writer and educator studied at the Free Institute of Education in Madrid and, subsequently, at the Catalan government’s Ausiàs March secondary school. After the Spanish Civil War ended, she went into exile in France where she studied Philology and Comparative Literature, taught Spanish, and wrote a thesis on the Occitan poet Pèire Godolin. During the Second World War she was a member and contact agent of the French resistance and, as a result, was almost captured on two occasions by German soldiers and the Gestapo. In the summer of 1948, she met the socialist leader Josep Pallach in Cotlliure and married him the following October. They lived in Paris where their daughter Antònia was born in 1949, but later they moved to Montgeron where they taught at the Lycée Mixte Expérimental. In 1970, after returning to Catalonia, they taught at the Autonomous University of Catalonia.

In the literary domain, her first novel, La charca en la ciudad, a fictionalised chronicle in Spanish describing the exile of people from the losing side in the Civil War, was a finalist for the 1963 Nadal Prize. The book remained unpublished until, decades later, it appeared in Catalan with the title L’aiguamort a la ciutat (2005). She has also written the series of novels featuring the king’s lieutenant Jaume Plagumà and his colleague, Judge Joanola. Set in Catalonia at the end of the sixteenth century, this series combining the historical and detective genres includes the titles El portantveus s’ha equivocat (1997), Juguesca mortal (2002), La trampa (2014), L'arbre trencat (2019), and El degollador de Vallvidrera (2021). She has also published the autobiographical work Tu ets jo. Flaixos per al meu blog (2015) in which, with exceptional skill and lucidity, she describes her intense experiences. In 2010 she was awarded the Creu de Sant Jordi (St George Cross) by the Generalitat (Government) of Catalonia and, in 2018, the Francesc Macià Memorial Prize. In 2021, the Generalitat of Catalonia has commemorated the centenary of her birth.

She is honorary president of the Pallach Foundation and member of honour of the Associació d’Escriptors en Llengua Catalana (AELC – Association of Catalan Language Writers).
 

Web page: Toni Terrades for AELC.
Photographs: Teresa Juvé family files and the Pallach Foundation.