Irene Polo (Barcelona, 1908 – Buenos Aires, 1942), a self-taught journalist and translator, began to work as a journalist at the age of twenty, with the magazine Imatges, after which she also wrote reports and opinion pieces for such publications as La Humanitat, La Rambla, L’Opinió, L’instant, and Última hora. She also wrote, in Spanish, in the magazines Gran Proyector, Films Selectos and Mundo Gráfico. In 1936 she went to South America to work as a representative of the Margarida Xirgu theatre company. The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s victory obliged her to remain in exile in Buenos Aires, where she worked as a translator from French, in particular for the publishers Losada and Sopena, as well as being advertising head of the Catalan perfume company Dana. In 1941 she had a nervous breakdown from which she was unable to recover and, on 3 April 1942, at the age of thirty-two, she committed suicide.

A pioneer of women’s journalism and investigative reporting, Irene Polo was one of the leaders of the spirit of renewal in Catalan journalism and a very important narrator in her times.

 

Web page: Toni Terrades for the Association of Catalan Language Writers (AELC).
Documentation: La fascinació del periodisme. Cròniques (1930-1936). Barcelona: Quaderns Crema, 2003.
Photograph: