Miquel Pairolí (Quart, Gironès, 1954 - 2011) was a writer and journalist. He studied Hispanic Philology, specialising in Catalan Philology and, in 1976, began to work as a journalist writing literary criticism in the cultural review Presència. In 1978 he began to work with the newspaper Avui and, after 1979, with Punt Diari whose editorial team he joined in 1987. From 1990 to 1994 he was chief editor and head of the Opinion section of Diari de Barcelona and, after this, combined his work as a columnist for the daily El Punt with full-time writing.

Miquel Pairolí is the author of an extensive, significant body of work including novels, essays, literary criticism, diaries, collections of articles, travel books and theatre. His play El retrat de Voltaire (1997) was awarded the Joan Santamaria Prize for Theatre. He published the novels El camp de l'Ombra (1990), El convit (1998), El manuscrit de Virgili (2004) and Cera (2008, winner of the Setè Cel de Salt Prize for the Novel in 2009). His work as a chronicler and columnist is particularly important and includes the diaries Paisatge amb flames (1990), L'enigma (1999) and Octubre (2010), which received the 2011 Serra d'Or Critics' Prize for Memoir Writing. He co-authored the Televisió de Catalunya series Carles, el príncep de Viana (2001) and, commissioned by the Fundació Catalana de la Recerca (Catalan Research Foundation), wrote the biographies of Joan Oró (1996), Antoni M. Badia i Margarit (1997) and Oriol de Bolòs (2001). Moreover, he published the essays El príncep i el felí. Una lectura de El guepard, La geografia íntima de Josep Pla (1996) and Exploracions: notes i converses de literatura (2006) as well as the collection of articles L'enrenou dels anys 80 (1987). He also translated works by Georges Hyvernaud, Fausto Manara, Silvana Gandolfi and Massimo Carlotto.



Web page: Toni Terrades for AELC.
Photograph: © ClickArtFoto.
Translated by Julie Wark.