Hermínia Mas (Casserres, 1960) is a poet and novelist. She has been awarded the 1995 Miquel de Palol Prize, the 1993 Caterina Albert Prize and the 2004 Tardor Prize for her poetry. Notable among the prizes she has received for her narrative work is the 1999 Folch i Torres Prize, awarded for the work Ulldevellut (Blackeye), which she wrote jointly with Josep-Francesc Delgado, a story with a background of ecological concerns and set in the Berguedà region, with a girl and a bear as its main characters.

Her short stories, which have been published under the title of El secret de la persiana (The Secret of the Slatted Blind), deal with the everyday problems of young people and adults: poverty, unemployment, amorous relations, frequently with tenderness and humour.

Among her children's books, the best known are La girafa del coll curt (The Short-necked Giraffe), a story about social exclusion and integration, La bruixa que no sabia riure (The Witch Who Didn't Know How to Laugh), or E-mail de Buenos Aires (E-mail from Buenos Aires), a thriller whose main character is an adopted girl who discovers a series of events from her past.

La pell del pensament (Thinking's Skin), her most recent collection of poetry is about the feelings, sensations and experiences of a rural childhood at the end of the 1960s in a setting that has all but disappeared.

She is a member of AELC (Association of Catalan Language Writers).


Web page: Bea Fernández and Carme Ros for AELC.
Documentation and Photograph: Personal files of the author.
Translation: Julie Wark.