Few speeches manage to break the slumber of an awards ceremony, but in 2018 Carles Rebassa seduced the viewers of TV3 (which was not yet 3Cat) when he received the Carles Riba for poetry for . It was a particularly tense moment: in the front row, the wife of Jordi Cuixart, then president of Òmnium Cultural, next to a chair with a yellow ribbon, and the poet spoke about writing poetry “against corrupt and vengeful jailers and judges; against the inaction of rulers who raise the flag and hide their hand”. He forced you to believe him because of that professional rhapsode cadence, with emphases, anaphoras and pauses for applause where he played: “I’ve always been taught that, when I have a microphone in front of me, I can only do two things: politics or poetry; and that, if I can do both at the same time, better”. Then they didn’t exist yet, but fragments of his speech would have made one reels fantastic As I write this, he is about to receive the Sant Jordi prize for the novel, the most well-endowed in Catalan literature, and I hope I am not mistaken if I assure him that he will thank him without yielding to the environmental invitation to celebrate literature, with some showy proclamation about the loss of the language or the misery of the cultural sector.
The first Night of Catalan Letters, which takes over from the Night of Santa Llúcia, gathers twelve literary prizes in a great ceremony at the MNAC, “the Gaudí of literature”, they say. The transformation has not come without reluctance, because a marked date with 75 years of history is missed and because the involvement of i 3Cat (civil society, academia and public television) with the three major publishing groups (which award the majority of prizes to unpublished work), just before Sant Jordi, puts on alert a sector in which business concentration has been feared for some time. Also because, now that most literary prizes have lost their prestige under the suspicion of advertising operations, a major recognition capable of legitimizing the book of the year, such as the Booker or the Goncourt, is more urgent. But the evening’s prize haul hides the Omnium prize for the best novel of the year under the cover of who will take home the 75,000 euros, which for some reason is the last announcement of the gala. For all of this it is relevant that in this first edition of the prestigious awards, the Sant Jordi jury had the vision to choose a writer from those who, when the dichotomy between commercial literature and literary literature is made, falls into the second group.
Carles Rebassa (Palma, 1977) has managed to build a literary career under the protection of institutional support and prizes (aside from Carles Riba, Gabriel Ferrater or Pin i Soler, to name a few), and at the same time to be respected fairly unanimously for the quality and coherence with which the work marries the political discourse on language, class struggle or the nation. In a 2012 interview, he says that he writes poetry for two clear reasons, “to identify myself and to fight against immobility”. They say that, at a very young age, he was evicted from the auditorium of the Sa Nostra Cultural Center in Palma because, with the filmmaker Hèctor Hernández Vicens and the poet Pere Perelló, they wanted to boycott an act by the then director of the Institute of Mediterranean Studies, “pujolist and Bourbon militant”, Baltasar Porcel, “who from his usual arrogance had belittled the poetic work of Josep Maria Llompart”, as explained on social networks. There is a list of controversial anecdotes like this: when he received the Ausiàs March, he made the members of the PP government leave the room in Valencia; and when he received the Ciutat de Barcelona he supported, in front of Ada Colau, Dolors Miquel, who the previous year had received a complaint from Christian Lawyers for versioning the Fatherland, for which the City Council apologized.
At 21, Rebassa debuted with a book co-written with Perelló, Resquiescat in pace. Then he worked as a waiter at the Món café in Palma and the experience of working in restaurants in a Mallorca devastated by speculation has been appearing in his poetic and narrative work. “I don’t take my job seriously. This is not my job. Here I am obedient, venomous, silent, more attractive even than the image in the mirror. But I am not interested in people being good there, in the Cafe. I don’t care, I don’t care if they say ‘Thank you, very kind'”, says the protagonist of Promise in a thousand waysthe novel that won the Sant Jordi award, which Univers will soon publish. Prometeu Dolors works in a restaurant in the center of Palma, and in the book the narration about the world of work is combined with another more lyrical one about the tempestuous relationship of this protagonist with the son of the owner of the restaurant.
“I’m not a writer, I’m a poet”, said Rebassa at the Carles Riba speech, even though he had already published his first novel by then. Disciple of Blai Bonet and Biel Mesquida, he was part of the university collective Mag Teatre, led by the philologist and activist Antoni Artigues. According to another member of the group, Rebassa “was already designated by Mesquida, Artigues and especially Bonet to be our Rimbaud”. In fact, from a very young age he had a relationship with literary Mallorca, without even knowing it: they were close friends with the writer Llucia Ramis, they went to school together and played at writing letters to each other.
They met Blai Bonet in the last year of the writer’s life, when Rebassa was 18 years old; they were introduced by Biel Mesquida. Bonet was so enchanted that he dedicated his last book of sonnets to him: “With the left cigarette lit, / the right one in praise, they see him running proud / and homely in the basins of a living eye / of whom he does not want to be a hero from the moment he kisses”. Rebassa explained to Diario de Mallorca: “I went to see him on Sunday afternoons. I liked him because he was a reference. We talked about life, his life; he liked to relive it.” Those encounters are the genesis of Bonet’s biography with which Rebassa won the Ricard Torrents Bertrana 2025 essay prize and which will be published in September in Eumo, coinciding with the writer’s centenary. It is the result of a lifetime’s work, with an original version of more than 700 pages. The theses that he repeats most about Bonet are the idea of freedom linked to commitment, the sensuality of the body centered on the figure of the young man and the unity of life and work.
After several poetry collections comes the first novel, , which in 2016 won the Pin i Soler and then the Ciutat de Barcelona. It is a novel that portrays a group of teenage boys, with a game in the first, second and third person. According to Rosa Rey, editor of Angle, “at the time it was published, and even now, this novel is unusual in the panorama: for the naturalness with which it deals with the search for sexual identity, for the literary approach to adolescence, which is not touched enough, and for the class discourse”. Both a It was them with the Promise in a thousand waysthe treatment of orality draws attention: “Rebassa is able to create a world from language”, says Rey, “he uses language in a very precise way, with a vocabulary that, beyond capturing Mallorcan well, is very genuine”. In 2022 he published the second novel Friday, Saturday, Sunday (Empúries), in which he narrates three decisive days in the lives of three editors of a Barcelona culture digital.
Write Rebate to It was them: “Generally, time and matter run in different directions. When we bring them together and make them go together, everything speeds up, things take on another system of being there. Yes, Albert. Everything is justifiable. Everything is harmony.” The search for this harmony between time, place, matter and word, the importance of the earth you step on in a certain place, brings him together with an author like Perejaume and becomes a nuclear element in El Caire Formentera (Proa, 2022), the last book before Promise in a thousand ways: “The world is sensory, the doors / are mental: being here is just a matter / of recognizing yourself and looking at yourself and saying ‘Hey!’ / and live, open to hope / (…) Here, in Cairo, in Formentera, in our world, / everyone wants you here, but they hide you / because their day is to see you pass / and to recognize you is their fear”. According to Jordi Cornudella, editor and part of the Gabriel Ferrater jury, this is his most rounded book: “Of the generation of poets who are not yet fifty, he is one of the most competent, from a technical point of view”, says Cornudella, “he knows a lot, about metrics, rhetoric, poetics… he belongs to the lineage of poets who have made a tradition of their own by reading”, closer to Enric Casasses than to others academics
Cornudella also associates him with the poet and friend Adrià Targa: “Both are technically very good when it comes to making verses, but they never do them to show the watermark or for exhibitionism, there is always the will to communicate a little or very shareable experience (generational or of social or political reflection)”, sometimes with the art of stirabot. Perhaps it is this desire to avoid the show that makes him a good novelist: “Normally, poets write novels that appeal to readers of poetry and not narrative”, says Cornudella, “but this is not the case with Rebassa, because history always counts; at this point we can already say that he is a poet and a storyteller”.
