Eudald Puig i Mayolas (Manlleu, 1948 - Terrassa, 2013). Poet and teacher.

Born in Manlleu on 4 May 1948, and with a degree in Catalan Philology from the Autonomous University of Barcelona, he spent most of his life in Terrassa where he combined writing poetry with teaching. In 1978, the year of its first award, he received the Miquel de Palol Prize for Poetry for his collection of poems titled Cel de nit. As a young man, he worked with the Manlleu magazine Faig, as well as being a member of the editorial board of Revista TS, and occasionally publishing articles of literary criticism in the magazine Serra d’Or.

Beginning at the end of the 1970s, his literary career took off with the publication of La vinya cremada, a finalist for the City of Palma Prize in 1982, which was not published until 1986. This was followed by collections of poetic prose and diaries like Paradís perdut (1985) and El traç d’un any (1989), and the poems Parc de Gessamins (1987). More than ten years after this debut, he published Poemes per a Clara (1998), which he dedicated to his daughter.

After the publication of La vinya cremada he corresponded with the Barcelona poet Joan Vinyoli, with whom he shared an interest in European post-symbolist writers like Rilke and T. S. Eliot. This epistolary exchange was published as Joan Vinyoli - Eudald Puig. Correspondència (1981 - 1984) thanks to a study by the Artés-born poet Carles Morell.

Although the bulk of Eudald Puig’s writing dates from the 1980s, he is not considered a postmodern poet like his contemporaries but, rather, that his poetry, offering a highly intense and essentialist experience of the poetic vision of the world, fits more with the tradition of Carles Riba and Germanic poetry.

His work, hitherto unknown to the general public and critics, includes the Japanese haiku form in his title Terres i Espais, which is published in the collective book of poems A l’ombra dels lotus (2003, winner of the 2002 City of Olot Premi Joan Teixidor Prize for Poetry, Haikus Online 2002), which was followed in 2004 by La vida entredita (winner of the City of Terrassa Agustí Bartra Prize for Poetry, 2005).

His complete works, Obra poètica complete (2014) are now published by Curbet Edicions, which includes previously unpublished poetry and poetic prose.

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

Web page: Pere A. Bestard Palou for AELC.
Cover photograph: Carles Mercader Fulquet.
Translation: Julie Wark.