Nuria Amat

Nuria Amat
Amat at the Göteborg Book Fair 2014
Amat at the Göteborg Book Fair 2014
Born1950 (age 73–74)
Barcelona, Spain
Occupation
  • Writer
  • librarian
Alma materAutonomous University of Barcelona (PhD)
Notable awardsRamon Llull Novel Award
2011 Amor i guerra
Website
nuriaamat.com

Nuria Amat Noguera, spelled in Catalan as Núria Amat i Noguera (born 1950) is a Spanish writer and librarian who writes in Spanish and Catalan. She is the recipient of the 2011 Ramon Llull Novel Award.

Early life and education

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Nuria Amat was born in 1950, in Barcelona.[1] She gained a degree in Spanish studies,[1] then completed a doctorate in information science[1][2] at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.[3]

Career

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Amat wrote some studies on library science,[1] worked as a librarian, and taught library science at the University of Barcelona.[2] Her first non-scholarly published work was a tome of poetry called Pan de boda (1979).[1] Amat went on to write essays,[3] short story collections and novels in Spanish.[1] She was part of the Barcelona literary scene of the 1970s and 1980s, maintaining friendships with such writers as Juan Goytisolo, Carlos Fuentes, Josep María Castellet or Enrique Vila-Matas.[4]

Amat's literary work is often complex in form and focused on the processes of reading and writing, frequently employing metafiction.[2] Her body of work includes the novel Todos somos Kafka, which both reflects on the literary tradition and its own structure;[2] it was called "magnificent" by Carlos Fuentes in El País.[5] In 2002, Amat won the Premio Ciudad de Barcelona [es] for Reina de América[3] – a novel about a Spanish woman writer living through a civil war in Colombia.[6] Her books have been translated to Arabic, English, French, Italian, Hungarian, Portuguese, Romanian, Swedish,[3] Czech[7] and Polish.[8]

Apart from writing in Spanish, Amat has also been published in Catalan. She has written a theatre play called Pat's Room (1997)[1] and a novel Amor i guerra about the assassination of Leon Trotsky by Ramón Mercader, with whom she is distantly related from the mother's side.[9] The novel brought her the Ramon Llull Novel Award 2011.[1][9] Amat started writing notes for the novel in both Catalan and Spanish, but then decided to write the whole book in Catalan, later creating a Spanish version.[9]

Amat has been vocal about rejecting the normalization of the Catalan language carried out by the Generalitat de Catalunya.[1]

Literary works

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Fiction

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  • Narciso y Armonía, 1982[1]
  • El ladrón de libros, 1988
  • Amor Breve, 1990
  • Monstruos, 1991
  • Todos somos Kafka, 1993
  • Viajar es muy difícil, 1995
  • La intimidad, 1997
  • El país del alma, 1999
  • El siglo de las mujeres, 2000
  • Reina de América, 2001; Eng. edition: Queen Cocaine, trans. by Peter Bush, 2005[6]
  • Deja que la vida llueva sobre mí, 2007
  • Amor i guerra, 2011[10]
  • Amor y Guerra, 2012[9]
  • El sanatorio, 2016[11]

Poetry

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  • Pan de boda, 1979
  • Amor infiel, 2004
  • Poemas impuros, 2008[10]

Other

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  • Pat's Room, 1997 – theatre play[1]
  • Memorias de una mujer libre, 2022 – autobiography[12]

References

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  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k "Núria Amat i Noguera". Gran Enciclopèdia Catalana. Retrieved 2023-03-23.
  2. ^ a b c d Amago, Samuel (2006). "Narrative Schizophrenia and the Anxiety of Influence in the Novels of Nuria Amat". True Lies: Narrative Self-consciousness in the Contemporary Spanish Novel. Bucknell University Press. pp. 95–99. ISBN 978-0-8387-5661-4.
  3. ^ a b c d "On Historical Memory: A Conversation between Nuria Amat and David Rieff". AS/COA. Retrieved 2023-03-23.
  4. ^ "Nuria Amat: "En Barcelona se discriminaba a los latinoamericanos que no pertenecían al 'boom'"". El Español (in Spanish). 2022-07-21. Retrieved 2023-03-23.
  5. ^ Fuentes, Carlos (2004-09-24). "La sombra dilatada de Kafka". El País (in Spanish). ISSN 1134-6582. Retrieved 2023-03-23.
  6. ^ a b "QUEEN COCAINE by Nuria Amat". Publishers Weekly. Retrieved 2023-03-23.
  7. ^ Amat, Núria (2009). Ať na mě prší život (in Czech). Translated by Marie Jungmannová. Praha: Odeon. ISBN 978-80-207-1305-6. OCLC 1186995195.
  8. ^ "Kraina duszy / Nuria Amat ; przekł. Katarzyna Jachimska-Małkiewicz". Biblioteka Narodowa (in Polish). Retrieved 2023-03-23.
  9. ^ a b c d "Núria Amat gana el Premio Ramon Llull con una novela ambientada en la Barcelona de 1936". El País (in Spanish). 2011-02-03. ISSN 1134-6582. Retrieved 2023-03-23.
  10. ^ a b "Amat, Nuria". www.escritores.org (in Spanish). Retrieved 2023-03-23.
  11. ^ "Nueva novela de Nuria Amat: 'El sanatorio'". ED Libros (in Spanish). Retrieved 2023-03-23.
  12. ^ Caballé, Anna (2022-08-06). "'Memorias de una mujer libre', una vida sin rodeos". El País (in Spanish). Retrieved 2023-03-23.