Raquel Picolo (Cerbi, 1961), a writer and cultural promoter, gives writing workshops and leads readers’ clubs and literary groups. She is very active in the reading and writing activities of several cultural entities as well as with her private channel. She has a PhD in Biology, thus adding a scientific perspective that can be glimpsed in her work.

After participating in numerous collective works, she made her debut as a solo author with the short story collection La nit als armaris (Voliana Edicions, 2012), a book that describes her origins in the high mountains of the Pallarès region and the journey of its inhabitants from the oral mountain to the written city. In 2017, she published Cròniques de Kaneai (Voliana Edicions), a collection of stories in the fantasy genre set in places of her childhood. She is a member of the Catalan Science Fiction and Fantasy Society.

In 2021, she published her first novel Art brut (Voliana Edicions), which she spent years working on and maturing as a work that aims to raise the issue of mental health in the form of literary creation.

As a cultural promoter, she leads the online community “Fanàtics del teatre” and takes part in the Reading Theatre project (National Theatre of Catalonia and Libraries of Catalonia). Her text for theatre, El miracle de les muntanyes, was performed as part of the “Labyrinth of Miracles” programme of the Esbaiola’t Festival in 2017. She also wrote the script for the documentary Camí d’Àrreu (2020), about a paradigmatic case of rural depopulation.

As fruit of her teaching activity, she regularly posts articles on reading and writing in her blog. In 2022, she published the manuals Escriure sense por and Secrets de la ficció.

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

Web page: Irene Zurrón Servera for AELC.
Photograph: Òscar Martos.
Translation by Julie Wark.