Mercè Company (Barcelona, 1947) has a degree in Fine Arts and is a writer and journalist.

In 1981 she left her career as a painter, journalist and photographer to engage in literature full time, to such an extent that she has now published some 190 titles. Some of her work has been translated into twenty-six languages. Notable among her books are La Nana Bunilda menja malsons (Little Bunilda Gobbles up Nightmares), Les tres bessones (The Triplets – with Roser Capdevila ), Les dents del lleó (The Lion's Teeth), La presència (The Presence), La imbècil (The Idiotic Girl), El germà gran (The Big Brother), El cervell perdut (The Lost Brain), La història de l'Ernest (The Story of Ernest) and El fill del passat (Son of the Past).

Very restless in artistic terms, she works in all genres except poetry, experimenting with many registers. In 1986 she wrote the screenplay for the feature-length film Qui t'estima, Babel? (Who Loves You, Babel?), which is based on the story La imbècil. In 1991, together with Balti Roda i Brossa, she founded the production company Iborn&Company. They wrote the scripts and produced for Spanish television (TVE) the twenty-six-episode series of Los cuentos de Nana Bunilda (The Little Bunilda Stories). In 1992 she and Roser Capdevila co-authored the blueprint for the characters of Les tres bessones. In 1993 she founded the writing school Aula de Lletres in her own study and, the following year, moved it to carrer Enric Granados, now with the name Aula de Lletres, Escola de les Arts Escrites (Hall of Letters School of the Written Arts). In 1997, together with Gisela Asensio and Pilar Ruiz Tarragó, she set up the Agustí Asensio Foundation with the aim of working for the word and communication and in memory of her husband, the illustrator Agustí Asensio (1947 – 1994). In 2000, the Barcelona City Council awarded her the Barcelona Medal of Honour in recognition of her career.

In 2004, she adapted her novel La presència for the stage and it was premiered the following year in the El Patronat Theatre of La Garriga, directed by Nona Asensio, who was also the director in the same theatre of her Càsting de fantasmes (Casting of Ghosts) in 2006. Her adaptation of La Nana Bunilda menja malsons is the most recent work she has produced for theatre, this being staged on 16 July 2012 in the Mercat de les Flors theatre of Barcelona as part of the Festival del Grec. In 2011, the Consortium of Libraries of Barcelona programmed a series of tributes to her work, with the small-format staging of a selection of her stories, produced by Mercè Rubí and directed by Nona Asensio (and the Charly Trama company). These were performed in all the libraries of Barcelona throughout 2011 and 2012.

She is now engaged in research, writing, personalised consultation for writers and in the field of communication, besides creating a very wide range of other projects.

She is a member of the Associació d'Escriptors en Llengua Catalana (Association of Catalan Language Writers, AELC).

Contact the autor.



Web page: Toni Terrades for AELC.
Documentation: Mercè Company and Toni Terrades.
Translation: Julie Wark.
Photographs: Author’s personal files.