Eva Comas-Arnal receives the Proa Novel Award
Eva Comas-Arnal (Gavà, 1975), is lecturer of the UAB Department of Catalan Studies. She received the 6th Proa Novel Award for Mercè i Joan, a fictional story based on the real-life love story between writer Mercè Rodoreda and intellectual and poet Joan Prat, who went by the pseudonym of Armand Obiols.
Mercè i Joan is the first novel published by lecturer Comas-Arnal, who is also a translator and journalist. She had previously published two research papers on the writer Mercè Rodoreda: El somni blau (Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 2020) and Afinar l’estil (Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 2022).
The winning novel, which combines real and invented characters, imagines the life of Rodoreda and Prat between the years 1939 and 1948: the end of the Spanish Civil War, the meeting at Roissy-en-Brie, the couple falling in love, the doubts, contradictions, abandoned families and fleeing to Limoges and Bordeaux after the Nazis occupied France. According to the jury, the novel is "brilliant, noble and bold".
The relationship between Rodoreda and Prat, two leading figures in Catalan culture, is a recurrent theme in Catalan literature and has been touched upon in several essays and epistolary works and from different viewpoints. This is the first time however that the issue has been approached from a fictional point of view.
The jury, formed by Xavier Pla, Mar Bosch, Anna Sáez, Vicenç Villatoro and Josep Lluch, editor of the Proa publishing house, was chosen from the 63 works presented this year.