Gabriel Martínez i Surinyac (Sabadell, Vallès Occidental, 1957), a writer and photographer, has a PhD in Communication Sciences. For the last three decades he has been a tenured lecturer in the Department of Advertising, Public Relations and Audiovisual Communications in the Faculty of Communication at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

His teaching career has focused on narrative and the image applied to a range of activities including photography, advertising, journalism, cinema and television. One of the most interesting areas of his work has taken him into the domain of fiction, leading him to explore the creative processes of cinema. As a result of this research, he has published the essay El guión del guionista (1999).

He has explored fictional narrative in communication with a trilogy of independent themes and featuring professionals from the media, advertising, cinema, journalism and photography.

His first novel in Catalan, Viatge a la batalla de l’Ebre (2005), is about the most famous, brutal and decisive battle of the Spanish Civil War. Two brothers, in an incredible journey to the past, fight side by side with their Republican grandfather in the Battle of the Ebro. Fiction is presented as a creative outlet for historic memory.

L’estrany cas del guionista que va matar al director amb un colt 45 (2012) goes back to the 1960s when hundreds of Spaghetti Westerns were made in the western film set Esplugas City in Esplugues del Llobregat. In this book, two young filmmakers shooting a cowboy video in a renovated set scheme and plot to achieve success in cinema. This book is a sarcastic exploration of a cinema in cinema.

In El foraster del Congost (2017) the Olympic Games have ended and a journalist and a photographer are investigating the finding of a hitherto undiscovered grave in a gorge, the Congost de Mont-rebei in the Montsec Range. They cannot imagine that their quest in historic memory will unearth a personal past that is to be determinant in the destinies of both men who, in the space of three days, are embroiled in an extraordinary story of love and death. The gorge keeps a secret and love will make it eternal. In 2017, El foraster del Congost received First Prize for the Novel in the Thirteenth Valldaura-Memorial Pere Calders Award, which was offered by the Autonomous University of Barcelona and the Cerdanyola del Vallès Municipal Council.

Gabriel Martínez i Surinyac is a member of Associació d’Escriptors en Llengua Catalana (AELC – Association of Catalan Language Writers).



Web page: Carme Ros for AELC.
Documentation and photograph: author’s personal files.
Translated by Julie Wark.