Marc Romera Roca

Marc Romera i Roca (Barcelona, 1966) is a Catalan writer (poet and narrator). He is the founding member and editor of LaBreu Edicions. Romera also works as a Catalan literature teacher. He has previously worked as a cultural journalist on the radio and as a literary critic for El País’ Quadern and the magazine Caràcters.
From a beginning influenced by Gabriel Ferrater and J.V. Foix, Romera’s poems seek to explore the limits that frame his unique poetic voice. Starting with La mel (Honey) (2001) the author finds his own voice, consistent and remaining faithful to a melodic idea of the phrase, each book searches for new formats to express a global criticism and develop its journey through the analysis of the human condition and the difficulty of communication. La mel is a reversal of the requiem mass, an invitation to sin and to the vital intensity in carpe diem format. In La pau del cranc (The Peace of the Crab) (2002), the figure of the psychopath is used to illustrate the image of the poet's social self-exclusion. Subsequently, the concentrated and strictly octosyllabic poems of L’aigua (Water) (2008), a pursuit of the critical eye that combines this critique with the fixation of essential moments, directly, compared to La mel, dressed in a luster of disappointment and resignation. Marc Romera won the Carles Riba poetry prize in 2013 for La nosa (The nuisance) (2014). That year he also received the Josep Maria Llompart Prize for the best poetry book of the year, within the Cavall Verd awards in Mallorca, a collection of poems that arises from discomfort and aims to embarrass the reader while that affords him a highly aesthetic construct of esthetic language. La nosa contains fifty poems in (false) prose laden with literary references (a common trait in all his work) and where the syntaxes are compressed while exploring their limits without renouncing their rhythm and to a presence of musicality that often erupts into verbal mastery. And it is this same voice, now setting an obituary that aims to set the duel, that, in Neu negra (Black snow) (2016), is purified and distilled until the substance is an alchemy that transforms the pain of death (in this case that of the father and teacher, the poet Francesc Garriga Barata) into an extreme experience of lyrical expression.
In parallel, but with the same sense of language, Romera begins his journey as a narrator in Mala vida (Bad Life) (2002), a generational fast-paced novel that becomes a cult book and portrays a scatterbrained youth and subject to disquiet one for whom everything has come easy, and has arrived late to almost all his struggles and tries to compensate for it with a combination of drugs, sex, laziness and extreme partying. Amanida d’animals (Animal Salad) (2004) is an exercise in style from twenty stories featuring typical characters by Romera, people who are self-exiled or who cannot assume normality as a way of life, who are isolated in one way or another, as in the story La intimitat (Privateness) (2008). The 2014 erotic novel Les relacions virtuoses (Virtuous Relationships), is an updated revival of Les Liaisons dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons) by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, in which the limits of eroticism and pornography are combined in a dialectic logic about the seduction, manipulation and deception thorounew social media. With that, Les relacions virtuoses is an erotic novel does not relinquish the literary requirements of the author and sets the bar very high for the use of language, especially compared to the majority of works to which we are accustomed in the genre.