Eudald Puig i Mayolas (Manlleu, 1948 - Terrassa, 2013) was a poet and teacher.

Born in Manlleu on 4 May 1948 and a graduate in Catalan Philology from the University of Barcelona, he spent most of his life in Terrassa, where he combined writing poetry with teaching. In 1978, he won the Miquel de Palol Prize—the first year it was awarded—for his collection of poems, Cel de nit. In his youth, he wrote for the Manresa magazine Faig, as well as being a member of the editorial board of Revista TS and, on an occasional basis, writing literary criticism for the magazine Serra d’Or.

His literary career, which began at the end of the 1970s, took off with the publication of La vinya cremada (finalist for the City of Palma Prize in 1982, but not published until 1986), and a subsequent series of collections of poetic prose and diaries, including Paradís perdut (1985), El traç d’un any (1989), and the collection of poems Parc de Gessamins (1987). Ten years after this first literary blossoming, he published Poemes per a Clara (1998), which is dedicated to his daughter.

In the periods that followed La vinya cremada he corresponded with the Barcelona poet Joan Vinyoli, with whom he shared an interest in European post-Symbolist writers like Rilke and T. S. Eliot. This epistolary relationship bore fruit with the publication of a study by the Artés-born poet Carles Morell titled Joan Vinyoli - Eudald Puig. Correspondència (1981 - 1984).

Although most of Eudald Puig’s writings are from the 1980s, he did not see himself as a postmodern poet like his contemporaries but considered that his poetry connected more with the tradition of Carles Riba and German poetry, expressing the highly intense and essential experience of a poetic vision of the world.

His writings, which are still little known to the wider public and critics, also include the Japanese form of the haiku, for example in his work Terres i Espais in the collective book of poems A l’ombra dels lotus (Winner of the City of Olot Joan Teixidor Prize for Poetry, in the category of Online Haikus, 2002), as well as La vida entredita (winner of the City of Terrassa Agustí Bartra Prize in 2005), which was published the following year.

His complete works are now available in Obra poètica complete (Curbet Edicions, 2014), which also includes other poems and poetic prose by Eudald Puig i Mayolas.

He was a member of the Associació d’Escriptors en Llengua Catalana (AELC – Association of Catalan Language Writers).

Web page: Pere A. Bestard Palou for AELC.
Cover photograph: Carles Mercader Fulquet.
Translation: Julie Wark.