Emili Rosales (Sant Carles de la Ràpita, 1968) is a writer and publisher who, after spending his childhood and adolescence in Sant Carles de la Ràpita, moved to Barcelona where he studied Philology. He soon began to work with a number of different publishing projects until he started his present job as literary director of Planeta’s Catalan-language publications.

His first publications were poetry, with Ciutats i mar (Cities and Sea, 1989) and Els dies i tu (The Days and You, 1991), but he did not take long to see the possibilities offered by the contemporary novel for the expression of his ideas about literature. He has thus worked hard to create a narrative style that is both poetic and capable of incorporating other genres, with the idea of writing works that, without renouncing the latest techniques, enable him to tell stories.

He first wrote three novels, La casa de la platja (The Beach House, 1995), Els amos del món (Lords of the Earth, 1997) and Mentre Barcelona dorm (While Barcelona Sleeps, 1998), and then moved on to the work that has situated him among the best of contemporary Catalan novelists, La ciutat invisible (The Invisible City), which received the 1994 Sant Jordi Prize. In this work he mixes present time and the eighteenth century, describing the great European city that Carles (Charles) III wanted to construct in the Ebro Delta region.

Emili Rosales has worked as a secondary school teacher and translator and, even while he resides in Barcelona, he feels that he is essentially a writer from the Ebro region, a place that he frequents both in his literary world and in his leisure time.

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


Web page: Xulio Ricardo Trigo.
Translation: Julie Wark.
Photographs: AELC files and the newspaper Avui.