Antoni Serra (Sóller, 1936-2023) is a fiction, memoirs and diary writer as well as being a journalist. He has been working with the Mallorcan daily Última Hora since 1961 and also publishes in the newspapers Avui, Diario de Mallorca, and the reviews El Temps and Serra d'Or. His literary work is wide-ranging in terms of both genre and aesthetic terrains. He has published the short story collections Entrada de fosca (The Coming of Darkness, 1972), Tríptic del viatger (The Traveller's Triptych, 1975), and Música de Mahler per a una lloca didàctica (Mahler's Music for a Didactic Mother Hen, 1985); the experimental novels La gloriosa mort de Joan Boira (The Glorious Death of Joan Boira, 1973) and El cap dins el cercle (Head in the Circle, 1979); other kinds of novels, for example Carrer de l'Argenteria, 36 (1988), which deals with anti-Semitism in Mallorca, and the educational novel Llibre de família (Household Register, 1991); and he has also worked on such collective publications as Negra i consentida (Black and Spoilt, 1983), with the "Ofèlia Dracs" literary collective. In the latter half of the 1980s, he began to write a series of crime novels based on his character the detective Celso Mosqueiro. These include the titles El blau pàl·lid de la rosa de paper (The Pale Blue of Pinkness of Paper, 1985) and L'arqueòloga va somriure abans de morir (The Archaeologist Smiled before She Died, 1986).

The committed left-wing, Catalan nationalist standpoint that runs through all Antoni Serra's work and especially, perhaps, in his memoirs titled Gràcies, no volem flors (Thank You but We Don’t Want Flowers, 1981) and the four-volume set of diaries Diari d'ombres, paisatges i figures (Diary of Shadows, Landscapes and Figures, 2002-2009), is also notable in his outstanding work in both Mallorca and mainland Catalonia as a political activist and cultural agent.

Antoni Serra was one of the founders, in 1977, of the Associació d'Escriptors en Llengua Catalana (Association of Catalan Language Writers - AELC).



Web page: Andreu Gabriel i Tomàs for AELC.
Cover photograph: © Carme Esteve / AELC (2016). Biography photographs from the personal archive of Antoni Serra.
Translation: Julie Wark.