Maria del Carme Serrat (Terrassa, 1943), a writer, has a Diploma from the School of Translators and Interpreters at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

In 2002, during a stay in Montevideo, Uruguay, where she had gone with her companion for professional reasons, she decided to make a radical change in her life. This entailed leaving behind her careers as a seamstress, shop assistant, office worker, shorthand typist, management secretary, German teacher, interpreter, and technical and literary translator to work full time as a writer.

She had been toying with the idea, unsure and hopeful, for some time by then. She had been a passionate, voracious reader from an early age and in several languages, which widened her horizons and offered new perspectives. From reading she acquired some early notions of the wordsmith’s craft and, at least, writing has been a way of exorcising the personal demons that sometimes meddle with the human spirit and emotions.

The spark of creativity, shining on the written word, is increasingly present, still flickering but determined not to be extinguished, and to claim its right to be present, and to fulfil its natural destiny of growing to become a steady blaze giving light and warmth.

At this decisive point in her life, Maria del Carme was nearly sixty years old. But she is one of those women who, when necessary, will burn her boats, and will crack every single egg to make a sumptuous, delicious omelette. Her thirst for knowledge impels her to imbibe at every possible fount of learning, whether it is about the art of writing and the art of living to the full … Or about the art of looking and seeing what the world and people are like, apart from brilliance, makeup, veils, and disguises. Then again, she enjoys discovering and perusing them as well.

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


Web page: Clara Bara Palma for AELC.
Documentation and photographs: author’s personal files.
Translation: Julie Wark.